Banks continue to pay scant regard to customer confidentiality, as this tawdry tale of a NatWest customer’s battle with a local branch of the bank portrays only too vividly.
Hazel Speed, a self employed writer, from Welling in Kent, shares the same phone number as the Bromley branch of NatWest - apart from the bank’s 0845 prefix and Miss Speed’s 0208.
This has led to hundreds of NatWest customers ringing Miss Speed’s telephone number over the last six years - since 2001 when Cable & Wireless installed the bank’s current phone number.
Miss Speed says: “People ring me up thinking I’m the bank and give detailed information about their bank accounts. Sometimes they give instructions to transfer thousands of pounds between accounts, so I am sure I could easily get their PIN numbers if I wanted to. If I was not an honest person, I could have defrauded the bank’s customers of hundreds of thousands of pounds by now.”
Despite alerting the bank to the problem in 1991, NatWest has refused to change its number. Instead, Miss Speed says the bank has sent her bullying letters telling her to change hers instead. Meanwhile she continues to re-direct numerous callers to the bank.
BT says the last seven digits of Miss Speed’s number should be unique to her and that Cable & Wireless was at fault when it supplied the same number to NatWest.
Why NatWest is refusing to do the decent thing and change its number is hard to fathom, particularly when Miss Speed has been a customer of the bank for 30 years.
Small wonder, then, that bank customers are so angry with their banks when the latter show such cynical disregard for their customers’ financial data and the distress they cause.
NatWest seems to have forgotten the undertakings the high street banks were required to give the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, last month when he admonished them for a series of security breaches involving customer data.
Even assuming this wrangle is eventually sorted, Miss Speed deserves some sort of compensation for the trouble it has caused her. “Quite apart from the potential security breaches, the calls have been a real nuisance because I work from home. If there’s a lawyer out there who would like to act pro bono for me, I would like to hear from them” she says.
