Tesco Personal Finance and forethought… now there’s an oxymoron!

Anyone who knows me will know that since November I have been having a few problems with my Tesco Visa Card.

The problems all kicked off on the 6th November when some benevolent tealeaf made 5 donations to UNESCO using my Tesco Visa Card. On the up side, at least they were donating to charity with it???

Anyway, Tesco Personal Finance thought these transactions were a little out of sorts and tried to contact me but alas had no success (I work during the day and they were contacting me at home). Apparently they did leave a message on my answer phone but as no message was received I am a little concerned as to whose phone they left the message on??

When I got my next statement I noticed several payments to UNESCO that were not down to me so I contacted Tesco Personal Finance to report it to them.

Now this is where it all starts to go horribly wrong…

When I contacted Tesco Personal Finance to report the fraudulent activity the person I spoke to was totally unaware that these transactions had already been flagged as possibly fraudulent by Tesco Personal Finance themselves.

I then waited two weeks before contacting TPF again (having heard nothing from them). At this point I was informed that my file had been passed to the fraud department for investigation and that I needed to write to them confirming that I was not responsible for the transactions. This I duly did on the 8th December.

About a week later I received a letter asking me to contact them as a matter of urgency, which I did believing this letter was in response to my last letter. Alas no, it transpires that this letter was actually produced following Tesco Personal Finances inability to contact me on the 6th and 10th November! Yes, it took them a month to write to me to let me know they were trying to contact me, despite the fact that I had contacted them 3 times since then (twice by phone and once by letter).

Once contact had been made TPF told me that there had been some fraudulent activity on my account (didn’t I just say that???) and that the account would have to be closed and a new card issued. Not a huge problem other than the fact that it was 9 days before Christmas!!! This was pointed out to them but alas, them’s the rules.

I eventually received my new card on the 5th January having endured a very lean Christmas.

So what is the point of this rant? Well I thought it was a good example of what can go wrong when different departments of an organisation don’t talk to each other and how a little forethought would have allowed me to buy Ruth a Christmas present…

TPF suspected on the 6th November that my account had been compromised and I contacted them to confirm this on the 22nd. Unfortunately due to what appears to be a breakdown in communications, no one realised this and nothing more was done for another month (or there abouts).

This delay was further aggravated by TPF’s insistence on sending all correspondence by second class post!

Had there not been a communication breakdown, a new card could have been ordered on the 22nd November. It would then have been ready to send out to me much earlier than was the case in the end.
Unfortunately I fear this experience is par for the course when dealing with financial institutions in this country.