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I have been unable to use my Premier account this morning and was informed on chat that my account is suspended for 10 days to comply with legal and regulatory obligations. As a law-abiding citizen this is quite a shock. Has anyone else experienced this? Thank you.
I have been unable to use my Premier account this morning and was informed on chat that my account is suspended for 10 days to comply with legal and regulatory obligations. As a law-abiding citizen this is quite a shock. Has anyone else experienced this? Thank you.
I would say this is unusual and fairly serious as the restriction will most likely have triggered AML alerts with one or more unusual transactions by virtue of their pattern, nature, source/destination or size.
Barclays probably won’t tell you much if anything at all while they investigate and sometimes can’t lawfully tell you the issue but it could be a totally false alarm.
To the extent that there have been any out of the ordinary transactions that are in fact innocent, I would gather any relevant evidence and send it to them promptly.
I’m sure you have other accounts you can use as this sort of action can be a precursor to account closure.
Thank you for your reply, absolutely no question of money laundering here but this causes further concern. When you say account closure do you mean that I might have a fight to withdraw savings etc?
Thank you for your reply, absolutely no question of money laundering here but this causes further concern. When you say account closure do you mean that I might have a fight to withdraw savings etc?
AML from a bank perspective covers a pretty wide range on things – essentially something out of the ordinary they need to investigate to protect themselves. If they closed your account they would give you notice and wouldn’t/couldn’t withhold money of their own volition.
Thank you so much. I feel completely bamboozled and shocked by this – your insights are greatly appreciated.
, absolutely no question of money laundering here
It’s not what you think that matters it’s what Barclays thinks.
What may be an innocent purchase for you may have set all sorts of alarms off at Barclays.
It’s worth noting that in many of the credit card closure posts that we get start off with statements of innocence only for that not to be case.
Now that’s not always the case and I’m not saying this to provoke but it will generate a certain level of suspicion from some posters.
You need to go through recent transactions and see if any are out of the ordinary for your usual spend patterns. The weekly shop isn’t going to start this off but have you made any one off purchases to a foreign company for example?
Thank you, I take your point entirely. The only difference that I can see from usual patterns are two £1,000 cash deposits at the post office – these were both in the last two months as I wasn`t aware that it was possible to deposit cash there until recently and my local PO is a lot closer than any of the banks.
My premier account kept getting locked every time I transferred money to my trading 212 ISA… I spoke to barclays every time and they said it was considered high risk. So strange. It got so annoying I just changed banks
I have just had all restrictions lifted on my accounts and the £9,000 taken “To Reconcile” has been returned. I have received no communication from the bank on this subject (I realise that might be the norm) so am very grateful to those who gave reassuring feedback here. Thank you very much.
Make a complaint and get some compensation
Definitely walk if they pull this $hit again and tell them why.
£1k is not a lot even repeated once. If you’re planning to do it again (and I absolutely would) then I’d write them a pre-emptive note saying just what you said, perhaps indicating how often you might do similar in future eg ‘occasional’ or ‘x’ times per year’ etc for the reasons you mention and mentioning likely amount or ceiling.
Seems likely this was the trigger but over decades I’ve heard IRL of too many cases where Barclays pulled the trigger on other things too, prematurely and disproportionately and I don’t believe banks’ DNA ever changes for the better.
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Thank you @Lady London. There is no question of me staying with Barclays.
Make a complaint and get some compensation
You won’t get any as long as the account was restricted in line with internal policies and procedures.
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