[Brad Lockyer]

Stephen Tibbs, a father fighting stage four brain cancer, sought to alleviate financial woes for his wife and three sons by transferring his UK pension to pay off his Australian mortgage, the Daily Mail is reporting.

He used the money transfer platform Wise to transfer more than $200,000, but could find no trace of the money when he checked his Aussie account.

The money, meant for their account, had veered instead into a completely different account – because Mr Tibbs had entered the bank details incorrectly.

Representatives from Wise explained they had no real authority over rectification if a client enters incorrect details. They did inform the Tibbs family the money had been transferred to an NAB account.

The Tibbs’ spoke to the NAB branch which held the account, and were told there was nothing they could do.

All seemed lost, until the family got A Current Affair involved. After the program ran a story on the incident, NAB was suddenly able to locate the money and return it to the Tibbs.

Jocelyn Turner, NAB customer resolution and remediation manager, says the bank will endeavour to do better in future when it comes to mistakes such as this.

“We’re delighted we were able to recover Mr Tibbs’ funds and have safely sent them on to where he originally intended,” she said.

“The time it took and the experience Mr Tibbs had wasn’t good enough and we’re determined to do better.

“Our team is now looking at how we get to the right answer quicker when customers accidentally transfer money to the wrong account.”

Have you ever made a bank error like this?

[Cosmo]

I can imagine Mr Tibbs frustration especially given his tragic medical condition. I must say that having to rely only on a set of BSB and account numbers to transfer large sums of money is a stressful event. However recently when transferring some money through a bank (not one of the big four) I was delighted to see as I entered the BSB number the bank name and it’s address appeared and then the bank account name after I entered the account number. If a smaller bank can do this, why cant all banks do it?
I realise that international transfers may be more difficult but if I can use a debit/credit card overseas, issued by an American company (Visa) through an Australian bank and the numbers on that card identify me and my bank as I move around the world, why should identifying bank account details be so hard!
Banks need to try harder using technology already available to them to prevent honest mistakes, fraud and scams.

[Des]

So you would be happy for anyone at all to be able to find your bank account by the most basic phishing – just punching in random numbers? I swear – the public is outraged when any privacy is breached. And outraged when there are privacy provisions put in place.

[Cosmo]

Des, not so fast, I already had to disclose my own full details, name, address, drivers licence, passport numbers tax file number etc to get to the point of being able to enter the BSB and account number. Are you suggesting scammers would be prepared to reveal these details to do their deeds? Numerous companies reveal their banking details for remittances with no risk. When I give my banking details it’s always of an otherwise redundant, unlinked cheque account with around five dollars in it so what value is that to a scammer?

[Ally Morgan]

I didn’t lose any life savings, but I sought to transfer what would be my annual income from one account to another, in a face to face transfer at my bank…completely stuffed up and more personal visits and multiple phone calls later, finally sorted. At the time I thought the clerk’s attention was elsewhere, but I repeated my instructions several times and she repeated them back to me!

[Author]

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