Mystery payments

[Wowbagger]

I normally pride myself on being able to keep on top of my finances. I bank with Nationwide, who have what I consider to be a very good mobile phone app, and most days I log in to see what's going on with my account.

However, I've just spotted something for the first time that appears to have slipped through the net. For the past 5 months, beginning on 7th Feb, I've been paying £15 a month to an organisation called "Complete Savings". I haven't got a clue who they are and I have no recollection of setting anything up. There will be a phone call to Nationwide in the morning to try to find out who they are and how I started to pay money to them.

I've been seeing this sort of stuff more and more frequently. Small amounts go out to organisations whose name I signed up with do not appear to be the same as the name that appears on my bank account. Perhaps I'm getting old and vague (I'm sure this is part of the problem) but it seems that organisations have more and sneakier ways of inveigling themselves into my bank account or credit card.

Does anyone else suffer from this affliction?

[Jurek]

*Goes off to burrow through statements*

[Pickled Onion]

Does anyone else suffer from this affliction?

Lots of people apparently

Nationwide are unlikely to be able to help you find out which of the hundreds of possible "partners" you might have signed up through. But they should be able to cancel the DD.

[Wowbagger]

Does anyone else suffer from this affliction?

Lots of people apparently

Nationwide are unlikely to be able to help you find out which of the hundreds of possible "partners" you might have signed up through. But they should be able to cancel the DD.

That's them. I've no idea how I signed up for this - or maybe my wife did. We have joint accounts. I'd never heard of them until I noticed the entry on my account just now.

[Wowbagger]

Since 7th Feb was the first time that this payment was taken, the implication is that it was a result of a transaction a month previously. This must have been around the time that My Dear Wife and I were ditching Virgin and taking out contracts with other service providers. I do recall that there was a £40 cashback advertised with 3 Telecom, and on 13th April that amount did indeed appear in my account. But by then, assuming that it was this contract with 3 Telecom that triggered the "Complete Savings" bollocks, I would already have paid then £45. Of course, I am not sure that this is what triggered it.

Looking at 3's website now doesn't seem to help much. It seems that they are offering £100 mastercards as a sweetener.

[Wowbagger]

https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/beware-costly-online-cashback-schemes-aRVQl7Z8LH6u

There's a Which? article about them. I just checked my emails and found nothing. My Dear Wife, however, seems to have signed up on 7th January. She had an email about it then.

Webloyalty may offer a refund if you didn't mean to join the programme and can demonstrate that you haven't used it, although this isn't guaranteed.

Read more: https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/beware-costly-online-cashback-schemes-aRVQl7Z8LH6u - Which?

From https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/beware-costly-online-cashback-schemes-aRVQl7Z8LH6u

OK. There's a job for tomorrow morning.

Edit: I was right - the payments were initiated by association with her "buymobiles" purchase of a 3 sim card for £18 per month, for her mobile phone.

[hellymedic]

Does anyone else suffer from this affliction?

Lots of people apparently
Nationwide are unlikely to be able to help you find out which of the hundreds of possible "partners" you might have signed up through. But they should be able to cancel the DD.

That's them. I've no idea how I signed up for this - or maybe my wife did. We have joint accounts. I'd never heard of them until I noticed the entry on my account just now.

I noticed a sneaky scheme costing £15 per month which I narrowly avoided when buying rail tickets online. I think it offered some sort of discount or cashback.

IIRC I had to go back a page or two to avoid this and buy tickets without. It's a bit like Amazon Prime - far too easy to subscribe accidentally.

I wouldn't be surprised if this happened to you after an online rail ticket purchase.

[Wowbagger]

It was when Jan signed up to her new mobile phone contract.

I spoke to the Nationwide scams department because when I went onto the app to cancel the direct debit, it wasn’t there. That’s because it isn’t a direct debit but a recurring VISA transaction. Because it’s on Jan’s card I didn’t have the authority to cancel the payment, even though it’s a joint account.

Once 9am has come and gone and breakfast has been dealt with, we shall set to work on these bastards. It was quite clear from the Nationwide scams department that they are quite used to dealing with people who have unwittingly signed up to this bunch of fraudsters, so in my view their duty of care over our money means that they should be alerting account holders to the fact that they are paying money for nothing.

It seems that the method of signing up for this is simply by failing to untick a box hidden somewhere on the online form. In my book, that is entrapment.

[Wowbagger]

Letter and (identically worded) email to the company cancelling Jan's membership, and a phone call to the fraud dept at Nationwide, whose agent assures me that no more money will go from our account to "Complete Savings". I spoke to someone at Nationwide early this morning in a call that wasn't specific to our account, and it was plain that they get a lot of people complain about Complete Savings.

From the Which web page linked to by Pickled Onion,

'Customers cannot join Complete Savings by simply clicking on our banner advertisement, they would always have to manually complete our sign-up page and submit it in order to become a member.'

After completing an online purchase with one of its partner companies, you have to click through to a separate Complete Savings sign-up page, where you must manually complete all the fields.

'We send all members regular email communications, including five in the first 30 days of their membership to confirm their member details, remind them about billing and encourage them to make the most of their membership benefits.'

All of the above are lies. We checked Jan's emails. She did not receive 5 emails from the bastards in the first 30 days, and there's no way she deliberately signed up for this. I was sitting with her when she ordered her new SIM.

[Tim Hall]

Edit: I was right - the payments were initiated by association with her "buymobiles" purchase of a 3 sim card for £18 per month, for her mobile phone.

As an aside, there's much better deals than £18/month for a sim card. (This assumes Jan isn't a heavy user of data). Take a look at Giff Gaff for example.

[Wowbagger]

Edit: I was right - the payments were initiated by association with her "buymobiles" purchase of a 3 sim card for £18 per month, for her mobile phone.

As an aside, there's much better deals than £18/month for a sim card. (This assumes Jan isn't a heavy user of data). Take a look at Giff Gaff for example.

Yes, I'm sure there are. But we wanted unlimited data. Probably overkill, but we are refugees from Bloody Virgin where we had unlimited everything, including grief and hassle.

[hellymedic]

Pleased that you tracked this.
As I posted upthread, I'm pretty sure there's a similar trap on some rail ticket pages…
BEWARE!

[Jurek]

Does anyone else suffer from this affliction?

Not personally but I am grateful that you have alerted us all to this, Wow and Helly.

*Goes off to burrow through statements*

Ditto here!

Just finished flicking through the last couple of years. All seems well.
I know. The time would've been better spent riding a bike.

[Wowbagger]

We immediately received refunds of £45 from this bunch. We are still pursuing the other £30. I have also complained to Nationwide that their fraud dept is aware of the existence of the Complete Savings scam but seems not, by default, to be alerting customers that they have started paying out to them.

[mzjo]

As it happens I have just spent a lot of time with a scam/fraudulent operation/theft ('cos that is what it is really) on my wife's account. She hadn't looked much at her account over the last few years, overtime with Covid (she's a just retired ICU nurse) and other problems just before. She asked me to look at her recent accounts for a payment for show tickets (which hadn't been made) and I remarked "What are these payments for a card? You haven't got one, have you?" Down to the bank to ask questions, the man said "Highlight them and you have a rdv with a councillor next week". So I did, traced back four years with three colours of highlighter and finished with an awful lot of operations. I have just finished doing and checking a spreadsheet that was the suggestion of the man from our Protection Juridique, taken about a week - mainly checking. Result, three associated companies over four years have taken a total of nearly 19K€. We have absolutely no paperwork, contracts or other contact for all of this. I think we have a bit of a battle coming up, including over the fact that we have unilaterally stopped the dds without resigning the relevant contracts ('cos we haven't got any!). The group to which all this belongs are facing a class action but there may be a limit to the size of claim you can put on a class action. Affaire à suivre as we say over here.
Just a warning, avoid buying a mobile phone in a high street shop in France unless you're really sure they are absolutely trustworthy. Don't trust boutiques linked to SFR!

[Wowbagger]

We immediately received refunds of £45 from this bunch. We are still pursuing the other £30. I have also complained to Nationwide that their fraud dept is aware of the existence of the Complete Savings scam but seems not, by default, to be alerting customers that they have started paying out to them.

I've just checked the bank account and the other £30 has been returned to us. Jan asked them to provide evidence that she gave permission to take the money and presumably they couldn't. So we've got our money back, but such crooks should not be allowed to operate in the first place. I have complained to Nationwide about them.

[perpetual dan]

I’m glad you got it back.
When Mrs Dan got rental deposit scammed a couple of years back the fraud department were very helpful, and blocked the fraudster’s account as well as getting the money back. Which triggered an abusive phone call.

[hellymedic]

Does anyone else suffer from this affliction?

Lots of people apparently
Nationwide are unlikely to be able to help you find out which of the hundreds of possible "partners" you might have signed up through. But they should be able to cancel the DD.

That's them. I've no idea how I signed up for this - or maybe my wife did. We have joint accounts. I'd never heard of them until I noticed the entry on my account just now.

I noticed a sneaky scheme costing £15 per month which I narrowly avoided when buying rail tickets online. I think it offered some sort of discount or cashback.

IIRC I had to go back a page or two to avoid this and buy tickets without. It's a bit like Amazon Prime - far too easy to subscribe accidentally.

I wouldn't be surprised if this happened to you after an online rail ticket purchase.

I see from Facebook this nearly tripped you up today...

[Wowbagger]

Well, it didn't because I was looking out for it, thanks to your warning.

[hellymedic]

No worries!
I want to scream

IT'S NOT FAIR!!!

[Feanor]

I've only just come across this scam.
This is what I got on completing a transaction with BikeINN, one of the *.INN entities that seems to be Spanish, but I've used before:


Scam by Ron Lowe, on Flickr

[Wowbagger]

That's the one! Did you inadvertently sign up? You get a "free" month before the scam kicks in. See if you can save some money. Do be aware that it's not a direct debit but a repeated visa transaction and you have to cancel it via the scammers.

[rafletcher]

Seems pretty obvious to me. It tells you what you’re getting into.

[hellymedic]

Seems pretty obvious to me. It tells you what you’re getting into.

It is obvious but someone completing a transaction might just be doxy and click on that black button, expecting to close the page...

[Kim]

Seems pretty obvious to me. It tells you what you’re getting into.

It is obvious but someone completing a transaction might just be doxy and click on that black button, expecting to close the page...

T(o)BAGO?