Abbey customer service – a frustrating story

Whilst buying some stuff off Amazon.co.uk on Tuesday evening, I was not aware that my purchase were actually going through as 3 separate transactions until I had completed the check out procedure. An hour or so later, my personal mobile rang (which is unusual as I have a works mobile which is the one I use most often and only my partner uses the personal number when he knows I won’t be home). On answering the call, a robot told me that this was a security call from Abbey and I was very confused as to why they had used this number and not my landline for a start, and then the robot proceeded to ask a couple of security questions and I started to wonder if this was a scam call, but the questions didn’t result in me giving away incriminating personal information so I held on. Then it asked me if I could verify the last 5 transactions on my card. The first amount they reeled off meant nothing to me as (I found out later) it was a third party company using the Amazon marketplace and the amount included postage which I wasn’t expecting. I pressed a button to talk to an actual person, who turned out to be in Bangalore or somewhere and I told him I didn’t understand why I had got this call nor why it had come through to a mobile number I barely use. He said that as I was suspicious, I should hang up and ring the freephone number on the back of my bank card. I did this and was given a number of options by another robot, none of which matched my query. They gave me another number to ring and so I rang that and again was not given any options that matched my query and the robot told me that I had made an ‘invalid choice’.

I got my bank statement out and checked the number that was on this for telephone banking and eventually got through to another person. I tried to explain to him that I had been making quite a few purchases on my card in addition to that evening; after all, my partner’s birthday was coming up and I was going on holiday soon so I had been buying presents and clothes – what’s weird about that? He started to ask me to verify specific transactions some of which I could, but one or two I couldn’t, again because I didn’t recognize the actual company names or exact amounts where postage had been added. I asked him to hold on a minute while I checked on my computer. I went to my e-mail account and found that 2 transactions had been declined. I told him this and he just said yes that was the bank’s doing. I tried to explain these were small amounts and again tried to explain that I had been buying stuff. Also, most of the transactions were for small amounts. Because I couldn’t confirm exact details of one or two small transactions, he said my card had been stopped and I had to ring the fraud department. I rang them and they shut at 5 o’clock. What madness is this? Don’t they expect fraud outside normal office hours?

The next day I was going to go to the bank first thing but guess what? On Wednesdays they don’t open until 10.00 by which time I had meeting commitments at work so had to wait until lunchtime. It did get sorted out, but after half an hour of the lady in the bank making calls and I had to speak to them myself again and was still being asked the same stupid questions to verify relatively minor transactions. I understand the bank wants to prevent fraud but this procedure seems ludicrous to me when I could show that I was in possession of my card and had been buying stuff, as I say, mainly small transactions. Sort out your customer service, please, Abbey!