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??/10/92 - Daylight robbery!
Evening Post
By PETER RICHARDSON
IT is, apart from the inevitable queue, one of the more convenient
inventions of this the Age of Convenience. Slide in the plastic,
press a few buttons and before you know it that most comforting
of phrases is being flashed before your very eyes... Your
cash is being counted.
Except there are those who walk this earth who believe a more
appropriate phrase might sometimes be ... Your cash is being
nicked! No, say the High Street banks and building societies,
the system which employs ATMs that's Automatic Telling Machines
to them, holes-in-the-wall to us is by and large infallible.
But try telling that to the 400 or more clients of solicitor
Denis Whalley, the North West lawyer currently championing
the cause of those who maintain that money has been withdrawn
from their accounts. And that whoever has withdrawn it, it
isn't them!
In theory the only way an unauthorised withdrawal can be made
via a stolen cash card is if the owner's secret Personal Identification
Number (PIN) is used with it. Vincent Leigh, of Stalybridge,
Cheshire, knows different.
He finally won a protracted battle with the TSB only after
confronting the bank with irrefutable evidence that neither
he nor his parents could possibly have made withdrawals totalling
£3,200. In fact he hadn't made any withdrawals his PIN
number was so secret he didn't even know it himself.
Explains Denis Whalley: "He was rummaging through some
things at home when he came across the envelope in which the
bank had sent him his PIN number. It was still sealed. He'd
never bothered to open it."
This lawyer, based at St Helens with J Keith Park and Co,
first raised an inquisitive eyebrow about nine years ago when
a friend mentioned she was in dispute with Lloyds Bank over
£30.
"She'd had three tenners taken from her account, and
it wasn't her who took them. I knew her to be dead honest
and I was about to get stuck into Lloyds when they paid her
back. I've thought these machines were a bit 'iffy' ever since."
Last October an elderly retired couple approached him with
a story that their card had been stolen from a handbag. There
was no PIN number with it. "The sum involved was £406;
So far the bank has offered them half that. It's not acceptable.
This couple are as honest as the day is long."
As word has spread of Denis Whalley's cash machine crusade,
more and more disgruntled bank and building society customers
have enrolled as clients. "It's over 400 and growing
at the rate of 12 to 15 a week. Every single one of them denies
having made the cash card withdrawls which have appeared on
their statements."
Every single case has its own set of circumstances, of course.
It may be that not all of them have a justifiable grievance.
But Denis Whalley is very much convinced of the fallibility
of automatic telling machines. The first of them, officially
declared open by On The Buses actor Reg Varney, appeared in
London during the spring of 1967.
So popular have they subsequently become that a typically
busy main branch will dispense tens of thousands of pounds
through one during the course of a week. For most customers
their sole complaint is that the the thing is shut down ...
again.
But Denis Whalley, a lawyer for 20 of his 42 years, offers
two scenarios in which some of us might have reason to complain
far more loudly. WHAT IF, for example, the bank was to send
you your new cash card, and then your PIN number, to the wrong
address?
Would the new occupant of the house from which you had just
moved, be as honest as you might hope? OR WHAT if the magnetic
strip on the pack of your new cash card has actually been
accredited with the wrong information? Cannot computers go
haywire?
Unemployed Kevin Glancy, a Leyland man now living in Blackpool,
doesn't know who or what is to blame for the small matter
of £6,000 or so which he belatedly discovered had vanished
from his account mostly in cash machine withdrawals of £50.
Print-outs show a strange and frightening pattern of withdrawals
- two lots of £50 Within a couple of minutes of each
other two or three times a month over three years. "It
was my life-savings from when I was working," he says.
"When I told the bank they said I must have had the money,
or that some close relative had got hold of my PIN number.
"My only close relative is my mother who is 70 years
of age. It would be ridiculous to accuse her. Besides I destroyed
my PIN number as soon as I'd memorised it."
Mr Glancy, a 35-year-old single man, could not convince Lloyds
Bank. He is now another client of Denis Whalley, and awaiting
his day in court: "I am not a liar,'' he says. His day
in court, like others who have signed up with Mr Whalley,
is looming on the horizon.
High Court writs have been issued against five banks and building
societies. A provisional hearing in London is due within the
month. Such proceedings preclude the defendants from discussing
individual cases.
But they back a statement put out by Barclays which says:
"We have no doubt that the action is misconceived as
we have complete confidence in our ATM systems. "But
at the same time we are very pleased that at long last we
will have the opportunity to defend our position in the courts."
Denis Whalley believes he has a case which may yet cost the
banking institutions millions not in compensation but to put
the system right: "I know the system has its faults and
what's more the banks know I know." Which is why withdrawal
is not a word to be found in Denis Whalley's dictionary. |
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