1) If you know the charges exactly, then send the 'Letter - Preliminary approach for repayment' letter from the Bank Templates Library. 2) If you don't have statements going back 6-years, start with the "Data Protection Act, Subject Access Request letter - List of charges" letter. It will cost you £10.00. 2a) You can get back 100% of all of the "penalty" charges. 3) If you go down the DPA route - they can take upto 40 days to reply. 4) Time from preliminary approach to Moneyclaim (ie, start of Court proceedings) - 28-days. 5) Time from Moneyclaim to judgement - approx 1-month. Hope that helps. Remember - the sooner you start the quicker it will be over. Good luck getting your cash back.

I'm pondering the wisdom of applying for an MBNA card just so I can join you! Have fun without me.

The issue with requesting statements is that the DPA letter also asks them to reveal any "manual interventions", so that they can't turn up in court and say "but look, your honour, we spent fecking hours manually typing all those letters...". However, if you have the statements, I'd (personally) just crack on with the preliminary letter and see what happens. After all, most people aren't even getting a reply to the MA question (I haven't yet from 3 different banks...!!). Good luck to you both!

Correct. The 8% only gets added if you claim in court.

Arf! In fairness, I don't think I've ever actually read all the T&Cs of any account I've ever opened.... until now, that is. Just converted my Egg CC into a loan (so I can DPA them for charges!) and read every last one of the clauses in the T&Cs, underlining the ones that aren't enforceable! Like the idea of phoning them everytime I use the card... "Well, the T&Cs said I should"!

I wasn't saying it was "correct", just that in the eyes of the bank they did nothing wrong. Adding £2k to your overdraft in charges is bang out of order and I hope you get every penny back ASAP. All I was saying was; as far as the bank was concerned (wrongfully), you owed £4k on one account and just happened to have that in another - so they netted one of against the other. The charges are wrong, the transfer is shabby but legal. Good luck getting the charges back!

It does sound, sort of, correct. Even though you have multiple accounts, they are all owned by you. If the bank transfers money from one account to another to offset a debt, they aren't really guilty of doing anything wrong. They certainly haven't "stolen" your money, because you are no worse off... Not good practice you could argue, but netting off is common in other walks of life; if you owe your mate £20 and he owes you £30, you could hardly complain if he gave you only £10 to settle the debt now could you?

Tuesday 27th June. Why? I've been monitoring the survey results since 9th June. The average number of survey entrants per day since then has been 20 recovering £17,350/day. The peak was 15/16th June when the average was £26,560 per day. Weekends are, understandably, lower than weekdays, averaging about £13k/day. So there you go - Tuesday.

Claire, 1) I hope your claim works out OK. 2) No issue as far as I'm aware about the debt being sold. You are only asking for the unfair penalty charges back from HFC and these are a seperate (but contributing factor) to the debt itself. 3) Have you got a recent copy of your credit file from Experian? You would need to find out what is on there that is causing the "I can't get credit for anything!". If HFC have you listed as being in "default", you should add this to your claim and force the issue through the courts if that's what it takes (it won't!). If it's the debt collection agency (DCA) there are various threads on here talking about them; search for "DCA" or the name of the agency HFC used. Good luck!

We shall see if that works. Quite a few of the other banks (A&L, Nationwide) are closing accounts if they have to repay the charges... Maybe HSBC are taking a more novel approach?

Welcome new person *waves* Yes indeed. It's called a data protection act subject access request (DPA letter). It's in the templates folder along with some notes. This is all covered in the FAQ (like... you *have* read the FAQ right...) Doubt it. Just write a stinking letter of complaint (making sure you have also cancelled the insurance!) You might get a grovelling apology. But then again, you might not... All of them, though they seem to have turned on the profanity filter - you can get away with some words, but others are automatically filtered. Creative used of punctuation works for me though! Good luck.

Partially agreed. One of the common problems of many/most/all people on here is "account management". It would be a pretty rum deal if a monthly supporter fee bounced, resulting in unlawful penalty charges! It would be a vicious circle! Another site I use has "donation icons". Every now and again (when the admins need some cash), they allow people to buy an icon which goes against their user details in posts. The icons are only available for a short while and aren't made available in the next round of donations. Doesn't look like this is supported in vBulletin though... Maybe we could encourage people to donate 5% of their settlements...

Option (b) might be the best. As TWAI says, if you take the proof of ID with you, it will be much quicker and once you've got the details you can hand-deliver the DPA request and pay the tenner! Good luck.

The "we are under no obligation" reply to manual interventions seems to be very common. The probably reason for this is because they don't actually keep structured records of interventions... It would be quite awkward for them to turn up in court and say "yes, but the manual interventions recorded here, here and here show we incurred excessive costs" on the grounds that you have asked for them and relied on the lack of reply to file your claim. Notwithstanding the fact that it is *highly* unlikely they'd ever let it get that far... My advice; Ignore this and press on with the letters. Good luck!

I'm crossing mine for you as well. Mint are on my "to do" list, would be interested to see how you get on. Good luck!

It wasn't memorable in a good way... but getting it back will be! Good luck!

I like to think of the amounts this way; How long would you have to work (in hours) to earn that amount of money. Allowing for taxes, somebody on minimum wage would have to work for 32 hours - or pretty much a whole week to earn £160. With the 3 claims I've started - it would take 1,320 hours... Good luck!

*BUMP* BF/Mods about?

Ha Ha Ha!

I think the SCO v IBM fight is more fun. But that's personal preference...

Thirded!

Good luck. Keep us informed.

Yeah, this is the "pre-estimate of costs" argument. They *claim* to have established the total cost to them of these transgressions and then divided it by the expected number of incidents in a year. If that were true, they would be able to turn up in any County Court of their choosing and prove the figures are correct. Of course, they are total and utter bollocks, but they like to keep telling the lies. Tell them to poke their goodwill gesture where the sun don't shine...

Provident Mutual, and by extension all of their policies were acquired by General Accident in 1995. Write to GA with as many details as you can provide and get them to find the policy and details.

Hello & Welcome *waves* 1) The £5/month for provision of an overdraft is a service charge and doesn't count for reclaim. You can only include "penalty charges". 2) You can claim for closed accounts. Hope that helps. Goods luck!