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“I lost my inheritance with one wrong digit on my sort code”
- derangedHorse 7y agoI understand that the other account holder's sentiment might have been "it's the bank's money" at first, but I don't understand how someone could accept money that effectively belonged to someone else and was only given to that other account-holder by mistake. It's effectively stealing in my eyes. Barclay's is also at fault here because at the very least they should have reimbursed Teich the full amount. He did make a mistake, but it was a mistake that should have been caught by the bank if they just made sure the recipient's account aligned with all the information specified by Teich.
- Bostonian 7y agoStealing from a bank is no more defensible than stealing from an individual. Banks have people behind them -- shareholders, creditors, and employees.
- rowanG077 7y agoYes it is. Just like stealing 1000 dollars from a billionaire is more defensible then stealing 1000 dollars from someone on welfare. The damage done on the former is nigh unnoticeable while the damage on the later would probably include starving without help.
- merpnderp 7y agoIf the law doesn’t protect everyone equally, then people start gaining a strong incentive to not follow the law. We can see the results of this currently all around the world with countries rioting and on fire.
- rowanG077 7y agoHuh? Why do you bring the law into it? No one ever said anything about that.
- jakelazaroff 7y agoIn many cases protecting people equitably makes more sense. For example, some countries assess fines based on one’s income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine Classic quote: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
- macinjosh 7y agoEquity is, in effect, code for treating some people different than other people due to immutable facts about reality. That's wrong. Equality is right. Enforcing equity is illegitimate use of the government and is an out right attack on everyone's personal liberties. I don't care if someone is rich, poor, white, brown, gay, straight, etc. The government treating someone differently (in anyway) due to who they are is wrong. End of story.
- jakelazaroff 7y agoA strict view of equality can actually lead to the law treating people differently due to who they are. Consider a flat fine for speeding: pragmatically, that means that someone living paycheck to paycheck has to obey speed limits whilst a millionaire does not. That is wrong.
- merpnderp 7y agoYou have a strange definition of "differently". A millionaire doesn't get to speed, that's just ridiculous. They'll be stopped, inconvenienced, and have points on their license, and eventually lose the legal right to drive. Treating people differently through some arbitrary definition of difference is wrong. Either we're all equal in front of the law or some animals are more equal than others. And the kind of justice you're peddling is what has set countries across the world on fire recently; the uneven application of the law. [Edit] I don't think I was clear. Everywhere we see special cutouts in the law, all that happens is that the more capable less scrupulous people capture those cutouts. The best we can hope to do is to treat everyone exactly the same in front of the law.
- macinjosh 7y agoYou're disgusting. Stealing is stealing.
- rowanG077 7y agoPlease don't put words in my mouth. I didn't say either of those cases isn't stealing.
- dang 7y agoPlease don't post personal attacks, regardless of how wrong the other person is or you feel they are. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Turing_Machine 7y agoYou're seeing "the bank" as a faceless entity, when in fact "the bank" (not sure about this particular bank, but in general) is owned by shareholders, some of whom are almost certainly disabled old ladies whose dead husband put their retirement savings in bank stocks because those were considered to be a safe investment. If enough people steal from "the bank" under your theory, the old blind lady winds up eating cat food and not being able to pay her rent because the bank is no longer profitable. That doesn't sound quite as "defensible", now, does it? Note that things like banks and insurance companies (another favorite whipping boy) do tend to have their stocks owned by things like retirement funds, precisely because they are considered low-risk investments with a safe (albeit small) yield.
- rowanG077 7y agoI'm not seeing the bank as a faceless entity. My point about the comparison with two people should clue you in on that. Your theory about if enough people steal from "the bank" doesn't hold any water since if that happens it's proven that the government will swoop in and save the bank as happened in the 2008 financial crisis. That's not even to say the vast options banks have to detect stealing if it would become such a huge problem. A person on welfare has little option. It's simple to me. a single person stealing from a bank incurs a lot less suffering then a single person stealing from a welfare recipient. The damage done is simply not even comparable.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Turing_Machine 7y ago> I'm not seeing the bank as a faceless entity. Yes, you absolutely are. > it's proven that the government will swoop in and save the bank as happened And you're also apparently seeing "the government" as a faceless entity with an unlimited amount of cash. When the government "swoops in", it's at the expense of every single taxpayer. I'm boggled that people are incapable of understanding this, or are in such denial about it that they feel the need to mod me down rather than debating the point.
- lscotte 7y agoThis is simply wrong. $1000 is $1000. Period.
- scarejunba 7y agoObviously untrue. Money has diminishing marginal utility. That doesn’t necessarily justify a theft but $1000 isn’t identical utility to all.
- rowanG077 7y agoI'm not sure what your point is. Of course $1000 is $1000 dollars. That doesn't mean the relative value of $1000 is the same for all people.
- Aeolun 7y agoFor the law. Ethically I do not think this is true.
- dang 7y agoPlease don't take HN threads further into flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- user5994461 7y agoPretty sure that by British law, they have to transfer back the money that was erroneous transferred to them.
- dfawcus 7y agoA lot of the banks have contract terms which allow them to correct erroneous transfers (i.e. incorrect deposits to ones account without ones approval), so waiting for a court order would not be necessary. Maybe Barclays do not include such a term?
- matthewheath 7y agoThey do. S1(1) of the Theft Act 1968[1] covers this. -- [1] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60/crossheading/definition-of-theft http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60/crossheading/def...
- gambiting 7y agoIt took the guy 2 years and nearly 50 thousand pounds to get it back. The law can say whatever, but if there's no enforcement then what are you going to do? There's a good chance you can get away with it, but yes, the guy had an extraordinarily bad luck of sending the money to someone who had zero morals. I'm sure(hope?) that most people would give the money back.
- josh5555 7y agoThe police are too busy investigating tweets that hurt people's feelings and offensive comedians. Also, TV license compliance. Priorities.
- gambiting 7y agoIn addition to that - the person who kept the money had literally no punishment for doing this. It is my understanding that they simply had to give it back and that's it. Even if they only kept it in a savings account for 2 years that would have generated a non-insignificant amount of interest(so they benefited financially from their crime) yet there is absolutely no punishment for it.
- austhrow743 7y agoDoes stealing baffle you similarly?
- t34543 7y ago> Teich contacted the Guardian for help. We asked it to reconsider his case, and in an almost immediate U-turn, it has now agreed to pay all his legal fees, and has offered him £750 in compensation. This is the unfortunate state of business. You’re fucked unless you can rake a company over the coals in a public.
- Bostonian 7y agoThe worst actor in this the person who refused to return the mistaken transfer. Why isn't he or she going to jail or at the least being sued for legal fees? Why does the article only talk about corporate sloppiness but not personal misbehavior? Why isn't the law changed so that people getting mistaken transfers can be identified quickly if they do not return the money?
- CTOSian 7y agoabsolutely, I believe that person is a crackhead: what if those money were from money laundering/criminal activities/funding terrorism etc.
- user5994461 7y agoThen it's better for the money to be lost to him than to fulfill it's original purpose? Plus they cannot make a claim to court to get it back given the context, although I'd be more worried about personal safety than court.
- ckdarby 7y agoThe original owner is much kinder than me because I honestly would have plastered the person's name who refused to return the money once I had gotten it from the courts. Hard for me to not be a pessimist when thinking about the future because it always leads me to believe there will be a social point system like that episode on TV series Black Mirror. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)
- lostlogin 7y agoI’m sure you’re aware, but the beginnings of this system are in place in parts of China. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/china-social-credit-system-punishments-rewards-explained-a8297486.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ch...
- 7y ago
- really3452 7y agoThis is why all account numbers should end in a 6 to 12 digit checksum verification, to protect against human input error. If this bank had implemented this simple precaution then the entire situation would have never occurred.
- zozbot234 7y agoIt was actually the "same" account number at a different Barclays branch. The account-holder may even have been largely unaware that the sort-code was a critical part of the unique identifier for his Barclays account.
- really3452 7y agoYeah, so the problem is that the account number plus short code had no checksum validation. This is the banks fault for implementing a rubbish account system. A proper system would look more like this sudo code: 1234567890-1234-checksum(1234567890-1234).substring(0, 6) where 1234567890 is the account number, 1234 is the short code, and then 6 characters are typed in at the end are a checksum. The short code is unique. So if you type in the correct checksum but not the correct short-code the fully-qualified unique identifier does not pass the validation step. Like-wise, if you type in the correct short-code but not the checksum then the unique identifier also does not pass the validation step. Thus, the user is protected against typing in an incorrect short code.
- gmueckl 7y ago6 digits are far, far too extreme from a usability perspective. We have IBANs as world wide unique account identifiers. They are very unwieldy with up to 34 digits, depending on country. And only 2 of them are checksum digits. Most mistakes are one or two wromg digits or missing/extra digits and that can be caught with 2 properly designed checksum digits.
- kwhitefoot 7y agoThis s unbelievable. My Norwegian bank account number has a check digit as does my Norwegian social security number. The bank account numbers have had check digits since 1967!
- occamrazor 7y agoDon't UK banks use IBAN? It contains a two digit checksum that prevents exactly this kind of mistakes.
- anoncake 7y agoMaybe they don't check it.
- lol768 7y agoMany UK banks will issue IBANs (they are trivially calculated from the sort code and account number anyway), and payments can be made to IBANs - but for transfers within the UK, there is no need to provide an IBAN. Note that it is still possible to check an account number without an IBAN: https://github.com/AntoineAugusti/moduluschecking https://github.com/AntoineAugusti/moduluschecking The issue here was not the account number being wrong, but rather the combination of sort code and account number being wrong - for which there is not necessarily a checksum digit covering the pair.
- dfawcus 7y agoMost UK IBANs can be trivially derived from the sort code and account. I have some accounts where the sort code and account are not directly embedded in the IBAN. So for those possibly there is a mapping table one could refer to.
- erincandescent 7y agoYou can _always_ derive it. For any case where you can't, something funky is going on (perhaps a common holding account IBAN where customer-specific information is encoded in the reference. I've seen this occasionally from TransferWise and Revolut)
- Havoc 7y agoNo. UK banking system is 6 digit sort code and like 8 digit acc. The accounts are IBAN compatible though & it's derived from the above - but I can send money to a friend UK-UK without any IBAN stuff.
- djohnston 7y agoim glad this all worked out in the end. i also find it sad that the sod who received the funds couldn't be bothered to avoid pillaging someone else's inheritance, but given my general misanthropy i'm not surprised
- user5994461 7y agoNice to see the legal system working mostly as intended. The person who received money by mistake has to return it by law. Given the specificity here, have to sue Barclays to find out whom did the money go to. Barclays cannot take customer money without a court order or disclose customer identity. Then sue the person to get the money back. I think the lesson here is that person who tried to keep the money is a dickhead. Moreover, it's really lucky that he didn't burn it all and was insolvent.
- lonelappde 7y agoI don't understand how this isn't prosecuted as criminal theft. In the US it's not legal to keep something clearly sent by mistake, and it's not even legal to keep a valuable thing you find in the street, if the owner comes looking for it.
- user5994461 7y agoIt's not theft. The receiver didn't attempt to steal money, it was sent to him without his knowledge or consent. I guess it gets blurry when looking at it after the fact and he's been formally refusing to return it for a year.
- plorkyeran 7y agoWithdrawing the money despite knowing it isn't yours is the part that's theft.
- jotm 7y agoFraud in the UK, iirc
- matthewheath 7y agoIt could be fraud by false representation (i.e. falsely representing to the bank that it was a legitimate and intended transfer the account holder was expecting to receive) per S2 of the Fraud Act 2006, but it's typically easier to prove theft under S1 of the Theft Act 1968 since that doesn't require any false statement to be made.
- jayalpha 7y ago"The banking industry promised that from mid-2019 name checks would be carried out when customers sent money to other people" Wow. So far behind. "Barclays said it asked the person who received the cash for permission to return the money, but he refused." There is nothing to refuse. The law in my country would be pretty clear about this. Honestly, just to prevent the guy withdrawing and spending it, it would very likely pay him a visit. But that is me.
- mantap 7y agoOkay but say I receive money from you, I send you goods or services, then you fraudulently claim to the bank that the transfer was erroneous. The law is as it is because arbitrating disputes between customers is correctly a matter for the courts not for banks. In normal circumstances the recipient would return the money and not try to steal it. The entire problem here is because the recipient fraudulently disputed the return of the money. The better resolution is to make sure such errors don't happen in the first place.
- PeterisP 7y agoThis is kind of shitty, but once the situation occurred (due to the stupid and IMHO inexcusable situation of "An oddity in Teich’s case is that Barclays also appeared to have identical account numbers for two different customers") there really aren't good solutions of the (unintended) recipient disputes the reversal and claims that that's money intended for them. All the things he initially asked Barclays to do were refused not because they didn't want to do that, but because Barclays can't do that. They can't return the money without a court order (in these particular circumstances the payment was "executed correctly" according to the legal criteria, because the payment was intended to be sent to that account number and was credited to the matchign account number, so any uf the more common justifications of error-fixing can't apply. But the payment laws pretty much implicitly assume that the account numbers are unique, and they weren't in this case), so if the recipient disagrees, then either it goes to court or the money stays there. Furthermore, revealing the account holder's identity would be a crime under banking secrecy laws - again, a court order was needed for that, it's not something that Barclays is allowed to do at their discretion. What does seem ugly is the obscene legal costs - it should not take 12000 and 34000 pounds to submit a simple claim to the court that (as far as I understand) was not even contested.
- londons_explore 7y agoThere's a good chance it was a 'no win, no fee' type lawyer. They charge extra because they know they don't get paid if they loose. Also, there was a good chance they wouldnt get paid if the recipient of the money took it all overseas, or if the 74 year old died before the issue was resolved.
- Waterluvian 7y agoThat just gave me a terrible idea. Legal fee underwriters who basically bet on winning cases.
- icelancer 7y agoThis is a thing. There are plenty of people who will fund your lawsuits against others and take proceedings. Source: I'm a plaintiff in a lawsuit that is very likely to win damages, and get contacted all the time asking if I need funding for the case.
- alexfromapex 7y agoIn the US this would be warrant a negligence tort lawsuit against the bank
- jasonmp85 7y agoWait these are the people who mock Americans for checks?
- dfawcus 7y agoWe still have and use Cheques. If the Solicitor had instead posted a cheque to the heir, then the problem likely would not have occurred, and if it had would have been reversed a lot sooner.
- jotm 7y agoYes, that's how it works in the UK. If you, yourself, enter someone's bank details and send them money using a bank's online interface, you are responsible. The bank can not just reverse that transaction. Best they can do is contact the recipient and ask politely. It's the cause of millions in fraud. So, learn from this and double, triple, quadruple check what you enter every time. It takes less than a minute and can save you from bigger headaches. Just like wearing safety goggles.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago> Yes, that's how it works in the UK. If you, yourself, enter someone's bank details and send them money using a bank's online interface, you are responsible. Except that you're not responsible. Peter Teich got his money restored using only the UK legal system. The process was: 1. Sue the bank for the other customer's name. 2. Sue the customer who received the payment. 3. Recover from them. This recovery is (surprise!) enforcible by the bank. If you were responsible for the consequences of sending money to an account you specified incorrectly, none of that would be possible in the first place.
- matthewheath 7y agoOnly because a court order mandated recovery of the funds. You are "responsible" in the ordinary meaning of the word for the details you input into the system therefore under its contract with you, the bank is not obliged to correct your mistake. Obviously, when a court order compels recovery of the funds, the bank is obliged to comply.
- jotm 7y agoI've been in a similar situation, and the bank was adamant they could not do anything beyond contacting the recipient. For £750, I won't bother with the legal system, so that's a loss. I do think it's a good system, if you want to recover your money, you can go to court. Wish it was cheaper/faster/more straightforward to do that.
- grabbalacious 7y agoOne can transfer a small token payment and ask the payee to confirm the amount received. If correct then transfer the remainder. It helps that my bank's site remembers the account details of recent payees.
- jen729w 7y agoNothing has changed since this happened to me, in reverse, in 1996. 18-year-old me had an account with the Halifax, then a building society. One week, £50 appeared in this account. I knew it wasn't for me, and didn't want to spend it as I knew I'd have to give it back at some point. (I'd asked my girlfriend's dad, a lawyer who worked for the Crown Prosecution Service, if I could just keep it. He compared it to someone parking their car on my driveway. They shouldn't leave it there, but that doesn't mean it becomes my car.) I wrote – on paper, in an envelope – to the Halifax. They said they'd do something about it. They didn't, and a month later another fifty quid arrives. This went on for a few months, from memory. When they finally sorted it, I pointed out that another bank (HSBC?) was, at the time, offering a £25 'sorry, we screwed up' payment. I suggested that they might like to send me £25. The manager wrote back and told me that as 'no inconvenience or cost was incurred by me' as a result of this error, he didn't see why he should give me £25. Looking back, this event shaped how I feel about corporations, about how the 'little guy' is treated. I was fucking furious, so I meticulously detailed all of the costs, including my time at the minimum wage of the day, and put them in a letter. I mean down to the cost of the envelopes, the stamps, and the landline calls that I'd made. Everything, itemised. It was beautiful. I called and got the manager on the phone. I explained my stance, and read through each line of the letter I was about to send. "Do you agree that this was a cost incurred by me?", I asked after every line. He couldn't disagree. I think the total was somewhere around £60. I finished the call by saying that he'd be getting this detail in the mail, and that it wasn't a letter this time, it was an invoice. Then – oh man, I remember this – I just hung up on him. They sent me a cheque.
- tantalor 7y agoYou didn't have to do that work, it was your choice, hence you were not entitled to recompense.
- thereisnospork 7y agoTo continue the analogy: If someone parks in your driveway, while you don't have to tow their car, you are entitled to recompense for towing costs.
- DecoPerson 7y agoThis is entirely a problem for the solicitor. The solicitor sent Mr. Teich's money to the wrong person. Mr. Teich's act of giving the wrong info does not let the solicitor give his money away to some stranger. Mr. Teich's is still owed £193,000 by his solicitor. The solicitor should use a more secure service for sending money. Something that is harder to make a mistake and that provides better guarantees. For example, a cheque, a money order, a professional money transfer service, hell, even a Venmo transfer would be better, as you can send a QR code and that's harder to mess up. Having worked in a post office and having heard hundreds of stories about dealing with corporations, I can confidently say that anything like this should be done by registered mail with delivery confirmation. Digital solutions simply aren't up to scratch yet. With any "interaction," there are so many things that could go wrong: information mistakes, sorting mistakes, lack of evidence when figuring out a problem, potential for identity theft, potential for malicious actors to gain, potential for things to get lost, lack of accountability, lack of insurance, etc
- AlexCoventry 7y agoWhat is a sort code? I don't think the US or Australia have the concept. It's weird to me that people would have the same account number.
- rangitatanz 7y agoIt's called a bsb in Australia. First six digits
- matthewheath 7y agoA sort code is a six digit code that identifies the bank and the branch of that bank where the account is held.
- thetinguy 7y agoYes, the US does have a similar concept. It’s called the routing number.
- techsupporter 7y agoTo tell a fun anecdote: My parents have two bank accounts with identical account numbers and different routing numbers. They still use both accounts for legacy features of each. The accounts used to be a single account at one financial institution. It got bought by a larger financial institution about ten years after they were married (this was their first joint account as a couple). Fifteen years after that, the bank split apart into three regional banks. The routing number changed with each corporate change but the account number persisted. In the last split, some customers who had property mortgages were “retained” by the divesting bank and “acquired” by the divested one. Thus, two identical account numbers, different routing numbers.
- mixmastamyk 7y agoYep. I lived in a country for while with modern banking. Bills were sometimes paid instantly, but often paid that night. Some folks still complained however, wanting it all to be instantaneous. Yes, that's possible these days, but be careful what you wish for. I fixed one mistake on a bill payment made in the afternoon later in the evening, thought "thank $diety," and learned an important lesson. Certainly large transactions should receive a modicum of scrutiny and delay to finalize. Also, it's easy to criticize the bank, but what should one do when a transaction is disputed by the two parties? How does the bank know which is lying or mistaken, for sure? Sounds like the perfect time for a court to get involved—that's what they do.
- dannyw 7y agoWe have instant payments under about $1000 in Australia, and next business day for anything over. RTGS (real-time over $1K) is available for an extra fee of about $2.50.
- austhrow743 7y agoThe amount that banks restrict osko to varies. For me it's $2k/day.
- nmca 7y agoIt's easy to criticize the bank because they're clearly in the wrong here. Names and addresses are provided and don't match at all
- mixmastamyk 7y agoIf you read the article you’d find that system has not been implemented nationwide, numbers are the full address.
- Too 7y agoWhat if the guy in the article intentionally provided wrong details? So he could purchase a valuable item using money in receiving account as proof of payment and then refund the money and keep both the item and the money? I don't think that's the case but seeing it from the banks point of view such scenarios could exist.
- onatm 7y agoAs someone who moved from Turkey to the UK 3 years ago, I could say that the British Bank system is closer to non-existent. You can't make such silly mistakes in the Turkish banking system because the system rejects the transfer if the recipient's name is wrong/mistyped.
- awinder 7y ago“Angered by the bank’s reply, Teich contacted the Guardian for help. We asked it to reconsider his case, and in an almost immediate U-turn, it has now agreed to pay all his legal fees, and has offered him £750 in compensation.” If your business can immediately do the right thing when contacted by a newspaper in a no-brainer case like this, but not a second sooner, then you’ve got problems. That said why in the world did the individual who forced this to court not get slapped with covering his court fees?
- peterkelly 7y agoI had a similar thing when I bought a unit in a brand new apartment building. We'd waited something like 6-8 months for the local phone company to install landlines (needed for broadband). The building was in the central city area, and the main telephone exchange for the city was 800 meters away, on the very same street. Finally the building manager got a local TV station to do a news piece on the saga, and two days later it was fixed.
- tjpnz 7y agoCorporations by their very nature won't lift a finger unless it threatens their bottom line. Without that kind of leverage you're at the mercy of their employees - and in banking there's going to be a whole lot of red tape preventing them from doing the "correct" thing.
- matheusmoreira 7y agoThen we should make sure their bottom lines are constantly threatened. May their their fingers never rest ever again.
- axaxs 7y agoI never understand things like this. Barclays is one of the biggest financial institutions in the world. It would likely have been way cheaper, easier, and faster to just give the man his money, and even throw a few thousand at the mistaken owner as a good will gesture. Instead, they are paying legal fees now, have bad karma from the story being published, and have angered both parties(or will when the money inevitably gets reversed).
- allthebestforus 7y agoWhy is the UK always in such a mess? And why not use control digit / check sum in the account number like every other western country?
- drdeadringer 7y agoAbout 10 years ago I had a "near miss" regarding rolling over "traditional" and "roth" 401k monies via a "trustee to trustee transfer" into separate, segregated accounts on the receiving end. I'm in the US. For whatever reason, and to this day I swear I was not at fault in giving correct or incorrect numbers across the board, both "roth" and "traditional" monies got dumped into the same receiving "traditional" 401k account. Bad times. Fortunately, the person I spoke to over the phone understood the situation ... excused themselves to their manager ... called me back with a solution that included a specialized tax form to sort it all out. A few days later somebody else in the receiving company called me up all "what is going on with this FUBAR?!?". I let them out-wind themselves, then calmly explained the situation as it had been to me, and then all was well for the second time. Tax time came around and thankfully all became well for the third time around. Since I am paranoid against the US IRS, I keep paper records for 9 years and on top of that digital-copy records going as far back as I ever can. Still, this is not as bad as OP-posted article, but I got scared just brushing against such an issue.
- switch007 7y agoThe solicitor should have sent £1, verified receipt, then sent the remainder. IMHO quite negligent not to, especially as they should be aware of what happens when mistakes are made.
- dingaling 7y agoI agree. That's how I do transfers to new recipients and I'm only moving three-figure sums. It adds some complexity but eliminates risk.
- contingencies 7y agoI maintain an IBAN library.[0] There is actually a lot that is interesting about account numbers. Really well designed account number systems do not include similar glyphs, for example both '1' and 'L' or both '0' and 'O' should not both be present. I have compiled a retroactive list of probable transposition errors in my library, which can recommend checksum-correct potential input intent through brute force search.[1] While many countries and specific banks had or have alternate checksum systems that pre-date IBAN, not all of them actually cover the whole account number (eg. may only cover the account number itself, not the sort code / branch code / bank code / whatever else). These are also falling out of use at an unreported rate so it is often difficult to determine whether or not they are now significant. Often a bank just starts ignoring its previous rules without telling anyone, leading to popular confusion. IBAN is a pretty well designed system, possibly excepting the mistranscription issues which it probably considered out of scope but could have seriously helped to avoid with recommendations / best practices. The point of all this is that you shouldn't reinvent the wheel... and that goes for digital banking and digital currency systems as well as any other system with identifiers that may need to be manually analyzed, compared, reported or transcribed. [0] https://github.com/globalcitizen/php-iban https://github.com/globalcitizen/php-iban [1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/globalcitizen/php-iban/master/mistranscriptions.txt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/globalcitizen/php-iban/mas...
- osrec 7y agoSending money between accounts is a jittery experience for me. There is almost no confirmation that the money has gone to the right place, and no checks in case of human error. I feel we need an additional per-account verification hash that works as follows: 1. Enter recipient bank details in online bank screen. 2. You are then shown a verification hash based on the details entered - you confirm it matches the hash provided by the recipient (obviously, make the hash easy to compare visually). 3. You enter the amount to send and hit send. This way you can at least ensure the money is going to the correct place. Right now, if you happen to send the money to an unintended bank account, you may never know until the intended recipient tells you.
- adontz 7y agoWow, it seems banking system in Georgia (the republic of) is so developed. We use IBANs (despite we are not in Euro zone and most international transfers are in USD), so errors in one digit will be immediately identified and request will get rejected. Also, if transaction is within the same bank, we always see full name, first name and last name initial, or first name initial and last name (depends on bank and transfer method) before final confirmation.
- perl4ever 7y ago"Angered by the bank’s reply, Teich contacted the Guardian for help. We asked it to reconsider his case, and in an almost immediate U-turn, it has now agreed to pay all his legal fees, and has offered him £750 in compensation." I dunno, this sounds fake. Financial institutions make mistakes all the time, and if the scenario here really did happen, what do you spend £46,000 on? Lawyers are expensive, but they don't charge that much to send a nasty letter. That's like months of billable hours.
- detaro 7y agoGetting apparently multiple court orders, as the article describes, is probably a bit more work and fees than "send a nasty letter"
- perl4ever 7y agoMultiple court orders? Does the procedure involve large amounts of unmarked bills for the British equivalent of a judge? £46,000 is obviously not "a bit more" than the fee for writing a letter. Why would someone assume the Guardian doesn't make up stories like these? Are they more reliable than the Sun?
- matthewheath 7y agoNot sure what the "British equivalent of a judge" is other than, well, a judge. Court claims are expensive. This ultimately would've been heard in the High Court and the claimant would want decent counsel to represent him as well as a team of solicitors and other legal professionals to research and handle the correspondence — that's the bulk of the fees. Then there's the cost of the application itself. The fee for starting a case is 5% of the amount for claims worth between £10,000 and £200,000. In this case, that's almost £10,000 gone immediately on the court fee. For one case. There's also a court fee for the initial hearing and the return hearing for the freezing order. Not sure how £12k was spent on the first case—article doesn't mention which court and suggests the High Court was only involved in the second case, but I suspect that isn't true.