Abbey Customers Need To Double-check Their Statements

If you used your Abbey Visa debit card over the August bank holiday weekend you may well have just received a wake-up call as to why you need to keep your credit card receipts and check your credit card statements very carefully.

Errors with the overnight processing of Abbey visa transactions that took place on 29 August 2006 meant that thousands of Abbey customers were left being billed twice for the same Visa debit card transaction. With Abbey themselves admitting they have no idea how many of their Visa card customers have been affected by this error, it is implicit on Abbey customers to double-check their statements and to query any Visa transaction they believe they have been charged twice for with their local branch.

Although Abbey have accepted full responsibility for the error and have promised to reverse all duplicate payments that have been processed, this further error in what appears to be an ongoing problem with Abbey’s IT throws into light the importance placed on customers to keep their credit and debit card receipts and to balance their statements against their receipts very carefully.

If, as has happened with Abbey, customers re faced with having been billed with transactions they did not initiated the emphasis on making sure that the payment is refunded to the account is on you as the customer and not on the UK bank or credit card issuer. What’s more, most UK banks and credit card issuer only given you a number of days in which to query any payments that have been made off your account once you have received a statement, so best practice would dictate that you not only check your credit and debit card statements carefully, but that you also do this often.

If, at any time, you think there may be an error on your account you should bring this to your bank or credit card issuer’s attention as soon as you can so that you can start the payment dispute/query process and not lose any right you may have to a refund.

Always remember that credit and debit cards are not foolproof. It is possible for something to go wrong with the IT processing the payments and it is possible for fraudulent transactions to be paid-off your account. To protect yourself you should not simply ignore your credit card statement in the belief that the credit card issuer or bank cannot be wrong; check, double-check and triple-check before you agree to pay for anything.

Richard Smith
8th September 2006

More Information:

• Citizen's advice
• Common Credit Card Mistakes
  With credit cards now outnumbering people in the UK you would be right to assume that not everyone in this country uses their credit cards either correctly or wisely. But what are the most common mistakes that credit card holders make when using their credit cards?
• Making Credit Card Fees Easier To Understand
  On average, UK credit card issuers make somewhere between £300 and £400 million a year in fees charged off of UK credit card users who have not fully understood how the credit card issuer has arranged the charging of their fees and who do not complain directly to the card issuer for any excessive or incorrect fee charges. In anyone’s language, this is a staggering amount of money!