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@dooks
Yeah man. I'd realised on Wednesday morning that some of our post had been going missing so rang to Barclays to let them know. I had to lean on them quite hard to get them to do anything. They were at that point still sticking to the "It takes five days before we allocate someone to look at your case" line until I pointed out, slightly testily, that this wasn't a couple of hundreds quid’s worth of dodgy credit card purchases, that it was tens of thousands of (mostly their) money and that we were totally nobbled by it having no working bank accounts.
After that their fraud people rang back within a couple of hours having been though it. Turns out that it all stemmed from our mortgage offer (also from Barclays) which had been "intercepted" by either postie or by someone at our local sorting office. Unbeknownst to us, when Barclays make an official offer they automatically set up an "offer account" which is just like a normal current account with debit cards, pin numbers and the "secure key" for online banking. All of which had been carefully filtered out of our post and used to get into my wife's online banking. From there they went on to clean out all of our accounts, apply for the loans, extend the overdrafts etc and then go to branches and kiosks to withdraw the cash and go on a shopping spree in Harrods on Saturday. They also spent £12 on lunch in EAT. Which strikes as me a bit lacking in ambition after all the trouble they went to with everything else.
Apparently there's been a spate of these types of fraud in my area recently SE11 Kennington/Oval to if you're nearby be careful. Upshot is that all of the online transfers and loans are being refunded and cancelled. The card purchases will take a bit longer to sort out (I assume we'll have to trawl though statements highlighting the fraudulanet transactions) but we should be up and running by tonight and hopefully back to normal fairly soon. Fingers crossed. Thankfully the mortgage offer is unaffected and we can still go ahead with that. What a palaver.
So if you're in the Kennington area and see a shifty looking postie with baguette crumbs on his blazer, punch him in the cock for me. Thanks.