Can a bank transfer be reversed

[T5SOR]

SantaBarbara said:

T5SOR said:

Bank Transfers can't be reversed. I have asked my bank about this in the past and they guaranteed that once the money has left your account there is nothing they can do.

Salary payments CAN be reversed in certain circumstances

I shall phone up my bank later and tell them they are wrong. A man on the internet told me otherwise.

[bugmenot]

You're payment was probably made using the Faster Payments service. These cannot be recalled.

If the payment was made as a BACS Direct Credit (unlikely, as this service is only available to businesses) then a recall can be requested as late as the working day before the payment is due to be made. A cut off time also applies. This request would stop the funds being sent but in rare cases the funds will be credited to the account and later debited on the same day. The next day the payment definitely cannot be recalled.

[darker grapefruit]

I used to work for a bank. One of my colleagues messed-up a transfer, and the money ended up in the wrong customer's account. We were not allowed to reverse the transfer without the written consent of the incorrect recipient.

[Shore]

Thanks all the replies. The chap is now went quiet after I states that the item was as described and that he should pay more attention to the advert.

[konark]

Shore said:

The chap is now went quiet after I states that the item was as described and that he should pay more attention to the advert.

Oooh, that's telled him!

[alorotom]

T5SOR said:

Countdown said:

SantaBarbara said:

You are wrong Countdown

Ok, every day's a school day....so can you tell me how you would reverse (recall) a payment that's already in the payee's account?

Say it's a salary payment

This is true. I’ve experienced a salary payment reversal personally a few years ago.

I checked my online bank and saw an unexpected salary amount from a company I withdrew from before commencing employment but after most of the paperwork was completed.

It went into my account through the night like normal salaries do but was reversed by lunchtime that day and gone - I hadn’t told them it was there

[Countdown]

alorotom said:

This is true. I’ve experienced a salary payment reversal personally a few years ago.

I checked my online bank and saw an unexpected salary amount from a company I withdrew from before commencing employment but after most of the paperwork was completed.

It went into my account through the night like normal salaries do but was reversed by lunchtime that day and gone - I hadn’t told them it was there

I can only speak from personal experience (25 years working in Finance) There have been several occasions where the money has gone into the wrong bank account (the last time it happened because our employee was going through a bankruptcy and his account had been frozen but only for withdrawals). The banks have never allowed us to recover the money, partly because the mechanism for taking money OUT of a recipient's account isn't straightforward, and partly because they don't have the right to take money out of somebody's account without the account holder's permission.

In your situation the only thing I can assume is that the money hadn't actually cleared. Sometimes banks will show money which is about to be paid in via BACS as already being deposited when in fact it hasn't. The thing is, your company would have had to reverse the whole BACS file which would have had a knock-on effect on every employee's pay, It's impossible to stop a single BACS payment, you have to stop them all. As a result it's sometimes easier to let the payment go through and then try to recover the overpayment via debt recovery.