Cash “Vanishes” From Bank Accounts In Ireland
By: GoldCore
GoldSeek.com
Wednesday, 25 April 2018
– Emergency cash offered by Ulster Bank as cash vanishes from accounts
– Bank makes €500 available to customers whose deposits vanish
– Bank investigates after hundreds of complaints on social media
– “My salary has disappeared from my account today and my wife had her card declined when trying to pay for a GP visit and medication”
– Cyber attacks and Brexit are biggest threats to the securities, insurance and banking sectors
– Exposes risks posed to cash deposits in age of hacking, cyber fraud and terrorism
– Conclusion: Take some of your savings and wealth off line?
Editor: Mark O’Byrne
Your money in your bank account can vanish. That is the lesson from yesterday’s enormous screw-up by Ulster Bank that saw payments and bank account balances suddenly vanish.
Customers were left out of pocket and struggling for funds. Payments including salaries were not made, cards were declined and customers were unable to pay for urgent goods and services.
Ulster Bank has blamed the issue on ‘human error’ and claims this morning that the issue has been rectified. Although it has taken some customers four days to be able to make urgent payments.
This was a weekend of bank ‘errors’. In the UK, TSB faced a ‘meltdown’ after scheduled IT maintenance went somewhat awry. Many customers found themselves unable to access their accounts, whilst some even had access to other peoples’ money.
The fallout will last for some time. We have all fallen victim to bank charges at some point or another – whether for missed direct debits or unauthorised overdraft charges.
Lets hope that the onus will not be on the customers to prove that it is not their fault that their account and their balances are not what they should be. Credit scores and ratings could be damaged and relationships with individuals’ creditors may be impacted.
Rather than be seen as an inconvenience for customers, bank users everywhere should see this as a reminder that ‘money’ in the form of digital pounds, euros, dollars and other fiat currencies can just ‘disappear’ whether due to human error or more nefarious causes such as hacking.
We might have mentioned this might happen
This weekend’s ‘magic money moments’ in both Ireland and the UK are the most recent example of something we have long discussed – cash in the bank is not your cash. You are an unsecured creditor and your cash can just disappear and there is very little you can do about it.
You can make a lot of noise on Twitter, Facebook and in the media and sometimes that may work but not with a lasting impact.
The customers of both Ulster Bank and TSB can rant on Twitter or shout down helplines all they like but legally they have very little rights when it comes to accessing their money.
This week politicians have enjoyed their soapbox moments, demanding investigations be done, apologies be made and new regulations to prevent this from happening again.
Sadly we all know that by the end of the week this news will be Friday night’s kebab paper. Banking customers will have lost motivation and politicians will have found another righteous cause.
The simple fact is that banks hold far more power over the cash in your bank account than you or any other party.
Some will decide to change banks (guaranteed not as many as said they would) but it will be a difference in name only. Cash, savings and pensions will still be held in the inter-connected web that is the global financial and banking system and no one’s rights will have improved.
From one bank to the next, the risks to cash still remain. Disappearing cash is a reality which will likely come to bank accounts everywhere with increasing frequency.
Human error is less risky than increasing digital risks
The Rest…HERE
