Reclaim Your Bank And Card Charges

[SMHarman]

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

If fees are illegal full stop then why were the credit card fees reduced instead of removed.

The fee is not illegal per-say, but if all they have done in the first instance is print some extra text on your next month bill reminding you that your account is 30 days overdue then how much has this cost. It has not cost more paper, it has not cost more postage, all it has cost is the programming development time to add and thest that if / then loop to the statement rendering application.

If they are sending out additional reminder letters then there are directly calculable production costs, of paper envelopes, toner postage, but this is probably printed on surplus statement rendering capacity so is there a cost of buying more printing and distribution capabilitlity that they can allocate as a fixed cost - probably not, but there are the staff and cost per unit maintainance.

Then there is the team of bodies that call up etc, that probably costs more money and can directly be attributed to late payers, but they do not kick in on day one, probably nearer day 60.

I would see the 30 day late fee dropping considerably, along with the interest rate on the card escalation (common in the US) as you are now considered a higher risk. So they will claw back the loss of the 'penalty fee' by increasing your interest charge (and you can bet that increase will be more).

I can also see that as the account becomes more delinquent, the fees will increase as the bank can justify that now the letters and the call center is calling the account holder.

My

[popper]

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

Ok I think there has been a misunderstanding then, I was calling it a pentalty fee when I meant admin fee. So its legal to charge for the admin costs involved but not legal to add anything on top for profit and penalise the customer.

OFT made banks reduce their credit card 'penalty' fees to £12 and i was curious if they would set the bank fees to the same level since if it was set to the same level it would be hard to see how credit card late payments can cost as much as bouncing cheques.

I would love for them to go one step further and stop the banks taking time to clear cheques and make them instant or at least same day clearance since its done electronically now.

it seems only the barrister used the right terms in the program, its unlawful (not illegal [theft) unless you can find the board member or accounts person that actioned the higher cost charge perhaps).

some things to remember, the bbc special panel said that they could NOT get the cost of direct debit ANY HIGHER than £2.50 MAXIMUM.

that, direct debit is tantermount to a CASH PAYMENT in uk law, so if your being charged more for cash payments then its perhaps unlawful too.

regarding the BBC program , i was rather disapointed in that he could have put the banking code of practice to the woman and asked the question , given that the govt have instructed that all govt/state benefits be payed into your members products, how is it that your members (I.e the banks) are taking bank charges out of these accounts when the UK 'BlueBook' laws expressly forbid you to take these moneys in charges....

how could she possibly brush that aside on public TV and not have some MPs instantly try and get some soundbites and find a way to push the whole charges thing to front and center....

(can we upload a binary file .ts to the board if so how? as i have a 1.35 second clip of that bbc panel)

[Shaun]

Originally Posted by popper

(can we upload a binary file .ts to the board if so how? as i have a 1.35 second clip of that bbc panel)

Rar/Zip it and attach it to a post

[popper]

Originally Posted by Shaun

Rar/Zip it and attach it to a post

funny iv never seen that option before down there LOL
rar/ziping wont get it down in filesize , so ill try renaming it.zip seeing as they dont seem to have
a generic binary option set.

i couldnt be bothered to re-encode it to AVC to get the size down but you can stuff it through MPC or VLC to play it just fine as is , might need to rename it and take the .zip off the end first.

hmm i watched it upload but i cant see it here?.
it seems their upload limit is way to small , i might take the time to AVC encode it after all and try again later perhaps.

well i tryed, i got it down to an 8th of its original mpeg2.ts size , now 5.7 meg and i still cant seem to upload it...
i didnt try and get it down any more as a simple single pass vlc transcode to AVC inside an mp4 wrapper/container should be easy to use, i can get it down even more but its not werth messing about with shell/cli encoding for this small clip, arr well...

[popper]

got it down to 4.3 meg but still not allowed that size

[lostandconfused]

Good morning all,

would just like to give a breif update on my ongoing saga with the halifax.

I was going through my online banking a few days ago and realised i'd made a bit of a mistake in my orginal letter, i put in a complaint for just over £200 worth of bank charges, but actually the amount was just over £800.

anyway it was late so i left it, so i could deal with it in the new year as i really didnt want to be onto the bank and waste my holidays.

So this morning i get a letter from the nice but ever so slightly patronising man from customer relations. From the beginning it doesnt look good, explaining how they inccur charges because of me etc etc and how its my responsibility and so on.

Then to my surprise at the bottom of the letter in the very last paragraph it says as a gesture of good will i would like to offer you a refund of £840. as im sure you can imagine as soon as i regained conciousness i was over the moon!

Im even tempted to drive to leeds and hand deliver the acceptance form.

As a side not i just realised as i was typing this that I have already had one of the charges removed before as I wasn't happy for being charged £20 for going overdrawn my pennies for a few hours, so they have refunded that charge to me twice now!

Finally would just like to thank everyone that has helped in this saga, I would have definatley given up long ago otherwise.
And for everyone that is thinking its not worth the hassle like i did, it cost me the time to write two letters and asking some advice on here, i think its worth it.

[foreverwar]

Congrats, mate - it is good you got your money back.

Must be the season of good will

[Russ B]

It would be good if we could get an insider's view of this situation...

[Mr Angry]

Originally Posted by Russ B

It would be good if we could get an insider's view of this situation...

Lost&confused.

Well done - told you it was "easy peasy".

Russ - By that do you mean a bank employee?

[Mike]

Well done............

Mike

[Shaun]

Originally Posted by popper

got it down to 4.3 meg but still not allowed that size

Upload it on Turbo Upload and then post the link

http://turboupload.com/

[Russ B]

Originally Posted by Mr Angry

Lost&confused.

Well done - told you it was "easy peasy".

Russ - By that do you mean a bank employee?

Yes.

[Mr Angry]

Originally Posted by Russ B

Yes.

It would be good - but highly unlikely. We know what happens NTL emps who discuss company policy on here and I'm sure the banks, bless 'em, would be even more trigger happy.

Ah well.

[greencreeper]

I went about £4 overdrawn recently, for which I was charged £20 - and they added an extra £30 because it was a Direct Debit that pushed the account into the red. I made a bit of a miscalculation in my finances. I feel like I've spent most of my life battling the powers that be. I'm tired of it - all very depressing.

[popper]

Originally Posted by Shaun

Upload it on Turbo Upload and then post the link

http://turboupload.com/

cheers for that link, it wouldnt let me upload and get the url earlyer but it worked now, its not great quality with some blocking but at 624 x 352 298kbps its not bad for my first try at super low encoding for an AVC (MEncoder264).

heres the link to the 1.35 second special bbc panel section clip of the banking program.

http://d.turboupload.com/d/1336729/2....x264.zip.html