Bank Charge reclaim

You've all no doubt heard about the campaign to get OTT bank charges returned.

In a nutshell, by law banks aren't allowed to overcharge or fine you for the way you use your account. They are allowed to recover a reasonable of money for the costs incurred to them.

However, for a long time banks have been charging outrages amounts for minor offenses such as short term - minimal unauthorized overdrafts etc.

Whenever challenged, banks don't want to go to court and return excessive charges when challenged by customers. The theory is, that when a court investigates, the true costs incurred by the banks will be revealed and they don't want people to know this.

Until now we've been pretty relaxed about it, being quite philosophical about the whole thing, knowing that the banks will give with one hand and take with the other (in more devious ways). But when you see a director at Barclays take a bonus of 22 million, you think - why let them take us for a ride? Let's claim and hopefully reduce their profits. If you let them, they will take what they can.

We have banked with First Direct for about 7 years now and always liked the service. We have 1 sole current, 1 joint current and a couple of saving accounts.

Like most people, we lead very busy lives. Occasionally juggling cash between the accounts kind of falls between the cracks and errors are made. e.g. Have a particularly expensive month, holidays, Christmas etc, and we forget to move money between accounts and end up incurring charges.

Now I don't know how many times this has happened in the years we've been with First Direct. I do know that it has happened a couple of times in the last 12 months, but both times we PM'd the bank and any charges were removed. (We thought they were being nice, now we know they were initially acting illegally and didn't want to be challenged)!

A couple of days ago (27th March), Clara copied a template letter from a consumer website, that asks the bank to supply us a history of bank charges we've incurred on ALL of our accounts. This was sent by email to the bank (logged in to online banking e-message system).

The letter states that they can't charge us more than £10 to get this information to us - Freedom of information act.

Once we know how much we've been charged, we will then go about claiming them back.

So far no response. We will phone them in a couple of days to chase if they've not come back by then.

I will keep you all posted in this thread.

In the meantime, anybody else here any experience of doing this?

Thanks for that. Good luck with yours too. Look forward to see how you get on.

Good to see progress. I'm hoping they pretty much just send the charges rather than a lorry load of statements.

Well done there. Good on you.

Well we just had a letter from the bank to say they keep records for 6 years and will supply these to us for no charge.

So far so good.