Nationwide customer has £763 taken to pay for somebody else's mortgage
A Nationwide customer has had his money taken to pay for SOMEBODY ELSE'S mortgage in a bizarre mix-up. Adrian Froggatt has spoken out to the Telegraph newspaper, detailing the scandalous situation which has left him "having lost all faith".
Mr Froggatt ended up paying a stranger’s mortgage after the lender took money from the wrong account. The 36-year-old noticed at the beginning of May that almost £763 had been taken out of his account for a mortgage payment.
That's despite the fact he has not got a mortgage with the building society. He was told that the mix-up was due to the sort code and account number being very similar - and a mortgage broker had inputted the payment details incorrectly.
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He was refunded the £763, and a few days later a payment of £500 was also paid into his account. But Nationwide said this was cashback on the mortgage - and it demanded it back. Mr Froggatt said: “It popped me into my overdraft for a couple of days, until they had refunded someone else’s mortgage payment.” He said: “It was more just concern about how it was that they managed to take someone else’s mortgage out of my bank account.
“The week before it had happened we put an offer in on a house, so I was getting bank statements ready and I had a mortgage adviser meeting a few days later,” Mr Froggatt explained. He said that the mistakes meant that he had “lost all faith in them as a bank”.
“It bewilders me that they’ve had this massive error, and then it’s flagged up and they have paid the cash back in, but they’ve never fixed the original error. It’s just ridiculous how it has all come about,” he said. A Nationwide spokesman said: “We apologise to our customer after an error by a mortgage broker meant a direct debit was wrongly set up on his account. Unfortunately, the cashback our mortgage customers were due was also incorrectly sent to him.
“As the customer shouldn’t have received the £500, we have requested the amount be re-debited from his account. However, we accept we should have been clearer on the initial phone call about the cashback. In recognition of the inconvenience caused by this issue, we have offered compensation of £200.”