Category: Life

In the post today to the ***** at Barclays:

Dear customer service people,

With immediate effect can you please close the above listed account. Since opening it, Barclays have proven themselves to be the most pathetic, useless, unreliable, mistake-ridden excuse for a banking organisation I have ever had the severe misfortune to deal with. In fact, I’m rather loathe to use the word “organisation” simply as it implies an ability to organise – something it’s been categorically demonstrated that your business lacks.

When I first signed up for the account, I was sent a letter telling me what items to expect in the post. Among these were a debit/cash card and a PIN. After two weeks, these had not arrived and obviously I was somewhat worried as I’d transferred £1000 into the account and didn’t want someone else withdrawing the cash. I called your help centre and was told to contact the branch I’d signed up with. This was rather difficult as I’d signed up online – something I thought would have been on my record. I was then told that the account I’d signed up for didn’t include a cashcard so I shouldn’t have been expecting one. Great start.

After a while, I deposited another £1000 and was shortly expecting the £100 “incentive” to be credited to my account. It never was, at least not until I chased this matter. At which point it was credited twice and then one of these debited again. It was during this fiasco that I realised that despite two requests to do so, you’d failed to change my home address when I moved from Bradford to Perth. I was awaiting a letter which had arrived some 300+ miles away to an empty house.

I am currently on an extended holiday and needed quick access to the money in the account. As you’d not seen fit to provide me with a debit card, I had to move the money electronically to another account. At this point, your online banking software decided to lock me out. I could only apply for new login details by providing my cashcard number. Which you’d not seen fit to give me. The only phone number given to contact online banking is a local rate number which cannot be called from outside the UK so I had to ask my mother to contact you on my behalf. All this succeeded in doing was getting me sent another arsey letter telling me I shouldn’t have given her my online banking details. If you’d actually thought about the people who use online banking (i.e. Those who travel) you may have given provision for people to contact you when they had problems with it.

After digging through the huge list of contact numbers online I found one number I could call – the number for lost credit cards. I rang that – though I could not reverse the charges as I was in Vietnam at the time. Non-Vietnamese citizens cannot legally make reverse-charge calls out of the country. The call got me passed through to Barclays banking staff and then got me exactly nowhere (what a surprise) and I was left with £2100 in a bank account which I couldn’t access. The staff were utterly unhelpful, simply asking me for a telephone banking password which I didn’t have as I had never signed up for it, choosing to rely on the internet banking.

The only way to re-enable everything was to get a new internet banking code and/or a telephone banking passcode. These would be sent to my home address. Which you still had listed as Bradford and refused to change without me providing a telephone banking passcode that I didn’t have. Can we spot the problem here? Don’t forget that I had on two previous occasions asked for my address to be changed, and had been told by one gentleman on the phone before I left the UK that this had indeed been done.

By this time I was in New Zealand, and made another two telephone calls to try and straighten this out. I was eventually told that to change my address I would have to send a written letter. As a bonus, I could ask for my cash to be transferred on the same letter and this would be done. I duly sent this letter and waited. And waited. And waited.

After 3 weeks, I called Barclays again (at huge expense) and they confirmed that my address had been changed, but that they had no record of any transfer of funds being requested. I instead organised a transfer out of a savings account as I was desperate for money. As a result, I lost interest on these savings. On the same day as the money arrived from my savings account, the funds I’d requested moved by yourselves arrived in my Lloyds account. In other words, the transfer request had been received, acted on and yet nobody at your end knew a damn thing about it.

In total, I reckon I’m upwards of £50 out of pocket in lost interest, international phone calls and airmail as a result of dealing with your completely amateur “bank”. My mother’s been run ragged trying to contact you from the UK and been stonewalled everywhere despite having complete Power of Attorney over all my financial matters – something I was told would take up to a month to register with yourselves and involve two personal visits to a Barclays branch – a 60 mile round trip each time.

Frankly in future, I’d feel safer shoving ten pound notes in a shoe box and carrying it around with me. I simply cannot put into words how utterly dreadful I feel you have been in dealing with the simplest things. Your lack of forethought for potential problems is staggering, your uncaring attitude to a customer with problems belies belief and your inability to perform the simplest of tasks such as change an address… well, words fail me.

I would not hesitate to recommend your company as a bank to anyone I truly loathed and who I’d like to see tearing their hair out. I’d certainly not recommend you to friends – I’d like to keep them. A complete record of my problems and your failure to get anything done about them has been published on the internet. Do a search for “Worst company ever” or “still *****” and “Barclays” and you should find it.

Best of luck finding more gullible fools to fill your coffers. If there was any justice in the world you’d go broke before the end of the financial year and spare any future customers the misery and panic I’ve gone through in the last few months.

Yours in utter disgust,

etc.

Yup, even worse than the Post Office (at least it’s free to ring or write them to complain). Yes, folks, it’s Barclays again.

In our last exciting installment, we left our hero stranded in New Zealand with virtually **** all cash. He had been requested to send a letter to get his address changed and to have money transferred to another account, which he duly did.

Lo and ******* behold… they bolloxed it up again.

Over two weeks on and no money in my Lloyds account, where it should have been transferred to. Thankfully, I’ve just installed Skype, so calling them this evening didn’t cost so much. This is a good thing.

I rang the credit card loss line as it’s the only number with a proper dialling code (I know, this isn’t a problem with Skype – force of habit). I explained to the girl I didn’t have a card or anything and I needed to speak to someone about my current account. She put me through to telephone banking that asks me to key in my card number or telephone banking passcode.

I hung up and retried.

The second muppet put me through to customer services after 7 minutes of hold music. There I found out that my address details had been changed (yay). But that the money hadn’t been moved. So they definitely got the request as it was on the same side of the same sheet of paper, and then they utterly failed to action it.

This has left me up **** Creek without the money for a paddle. Or more precisely, I’ve got a camper van to hire in 2 days and not enough money in my bank to pay for it.

Useless Bird put me through to the Customer Relations department (15 minutes on the phone and counting), where another girl proved to be as useless as everyone else. After explaining everything to the vacious tart, it took two requests for an address to write a complaint to for her to give me one. She also asked what number she could call me back on. Hello?

I told her to call my mother who has Power of Attorney. But she’s not linked to the account. Of course not. She’s my mother, not my spouse, and I don’t live in Hicksville, South Carolina (or Invercargill, south NZ to be topical) so she wouldn’t be. ****’s sake.

I got the number of her department off her and was told to call back. OK, so she apologised umpteen times for my situatoin and how much it was costing me to call but – really – you could tell she didn’t give a ****.

Of course, there’ll be a letter heading their way shortly (I’ll copy it up here) but it won’t do any good as it’s obvious I’m moving my money away to close my account down.

Barclays. *****. Stupid, useless, thumb-up-arse *****. All of them. *****. Avoid, avoid, avoid. I’d be grateful if as many people as possible could link to this article using the word “Barclays” so it rockets up Google.

Following on from this older post, I’ve been having even more “fun” with this crap-awful excuse for a financial organisation. No, not organisation. “Organisation” implies organisation i.e. that they’re organised. And they sure as **** aren’t.

Before I left the UK I rang them up to change my address to that of my folks. Same as everyone else. Only Barclays decided to be different from every other place I got in touch with and ignore my request. Just to be really different they ignored it twice.

Originally, I rang them up to change it. The guy on the phone said he didn’t think it could be done on the telephone without my Phone Banking Passcode. Which I’d not been issued as I’d not signed up for phone banking. But, no, it was OK – it’s only an address change so he can do it (and did – apparently). However, he did tell me to follow this up with a written request as well, which as I didn’t trust him or the bank, I duly did.

To no ******* avail.

I got an inkling after I emailed them regarding another inconsistency in my account about 6 weeks later. A reply came back telling me that, due to the confidential nature of the reply, it had to be sent by mail and to expect a letter in due course. 3 weeks later, and my folks hadn’t received anything. Getting Kim to check I found out why – said letter had gone to Bradford.

Then my internet banking got locked out again. This time I’m 100% positive the details I was entering were correct as I had a flipping record of them that I’d used before.

No worries, thinks I. Get the mother to call them. She has a power of attorney over all my financial dealings.

Tough ****, said Barclays when she called. We don’t care. We need to speak to the man himself who, at that time, was in Hanoi and unable to get a working telephone to ring internationally. Either way, I couldn’t ring the 0845 number required. I needed a genuine, proper, regional phone number.

Currently in New Zealand and I’m in the same boat. I managed to get hold of the “lost and stolen card” number and used that as it’s the only non-08** number they publish. The woman at the end of the phone was nicely useless, but put me though to someone marginally more useful but a **** of a lot less sympathetic.

End result – unless my mother can attend a branch of Barclays to register her Power of Attorney (round trip – 60 miles) and then wait up to a month for it to be accepted and then attend in person again to access my funds and move them elsewhere… the quickest way is to write them a letter. How ******* great is that?

They go on and on about their internet banking. But to fix that I have to ring them on a number I can’t access as I’m abroad – which is when people are quite likely to need internet banking. Even if I could get to them they have to send me a new access code. Which would go to my old address which I can’t access. And I can’t change that address without sending them a letter or having my mother make two trips to a remote branch.

Solution: I wrote them a letter. Both changing my address and asking them to transfer all the funds to another account, then close the account forthwith, retrieving all their records, mulching them with razor blades and shoving the whole lot up their collective ******* arses.

OK, maybe not the last few bits but that’s only as I didn’t have room on the letter to squeeze it into a P.S. Once I have my cash safely into an account I can access, I’ll let them know what they can do with their shoddy account.

******* *******.