Paphos Life

Earlier this month I contacted my bank in the UK to tell them my wife had passed away, I spoke to them on the phone and sent the paper work over the internet on there site.

I was told that her name would be removed from the account her card cancelled and all would be all in my name.

Well to my surprise I tried to log in to the bank only to have a screen telling me I had no accounts on file.

After 35 minutes of been transferred from one to another member of staff I got a lady who new her stuff and she was from my home town of Sunderland.

She had my data on screen and we went through it all.

It turns out someone in the office did not read things properly; they closed my account, blocked my card and sent a cheque out to my UK address.

I asked can you reopen the account again she said “Yes” they then have to cancel the cheque and issue a new bank card to me and possibly a new pin number, then I might have to re-log in to the bank to set up a new online login for the account.

There are 3 pensions paid in to this account, can you imagine had they tried to pay them and the account was closed, also there was over 6,000 in the account.

There making a complaint out for me so as to see how this happened and do an investigation in to this as there was no instruction to close the account!!

I was only in the account the day before and all was fine.

It is going to be about 3 weeks before I can get into this account again, and this is my living account.

Paul

Not a great experience for you. I hope that it gets resolved as soon as possible.

Good news they reopened my account and the money is back in the account.
I am now waiting to see about a new card!
Paul

Well my replacement card has arrived, it has only taken 26 days to sort this out!

There are good banks and bad banks.

One of the big high street banks I used in the past, I wouldn't touch with a barge pole now, they were useless, even trying to cover up their errors.

Glad you have it all sorted out now, it must have caused so much stress at a very distressing and emotional time.

Jackie

Cactus, we used the site after my dad passed away but it doesn't cover all eventualities. We still had to do lots of manual notification with copy death certificates etc.

On the wider subject of close family passing away, the ‘Tell us Once’ service from U.K. Gov is excellent as I discovered when my my Mum died last year. It covers many areas such as driving licences, passport, council tax, state pensions and income tax, local government and armed forces pensions and it does not cover banks, building societies, private pensions.

U.K. FI have set up a similar service which many of the U.K. financial institutions participate in, see link below:

https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/press/pres ... on-service

We did not actually use this in the end as all of the places where she had accounts could be done easily enough directly. We were, with a couple of challenges along the way with post, able to get all done from here online or over the phone for utilities, account closures, probate and inheritance tax assessments etc.

Ian

Paul.

Condolences regarding your wife..

Well they have done it again blocked my card!!!

I got my new card on the 11th August and used it here in Cyprus then went to the UK on the 18th and used it there and came back on the 29th.

I used the card on the 1st September and the they blocked it again.

I have been trying for an hour to contact them by phone and get no answer for a person then cut off after 30 mins.

At €4.50 per 1/2 hour its not cheap to call them.

One Pee'd off Paul

Update they have had a problem with the computer system it went down around 1am UK time.
So my card should be OK now!

I found the tell us I 've site fairly useless. There were only two institutions that were on it when MOH passed away and one of those pestered me 4 times before they got the message!

Santander Bank.