Honestly, I'm not lying !

I remember one from a while ago, it went like this…

Phones bank and gets an Indian call centre…..

“Hello can I please be put through to my branch please”…

“Madam this is the XYZ bank call centre I can help you with your requirements”…

“Good, can you put me through to my branch in xyz high street”

“No Madam I will help you, do you require a loan”?

“No I wish to speak to my local branch”…

“Your branch can not tell you anything I cannot do Madam”,

“Then can you please tell me if I left my gloves on the counter when i popped in 30 mins ago and are they still there”?…………

Silence…………………………

This made me chuckle :p. I agree with what a lot of people have said, and it really annoys me when I get called by a company who insist I should prove I am who they think they are calling. I don’t do that to them! “If you are ********* ltd then prove it!”….they would be bloody lost then!

The serious thing to all this though….I can be serious can’t I? Mines green and I’ll take it in a seven and three quarters please…The old phone selling, or joining mallarky now called worldwidewebbyglobalinternety thingy service, exampled by the magnificent invention of the call centre is all….Our own fault..We were conned..fell for it…hook line and sinker…It was developed for business not us..and that is the way it works. We signed up like lemmings…I’m chief lemming by the way, still around because as Chief, someone has to direct other lemmings to best cliff spotting areas. Business doesn’t give a hoot about the customer, never has, but in days before, internetwebbythingy world of wonder and its b….d son the call centre…They at least had to give the impression they cared for our business…Try getting hold of British Gas on phone and see if you are ever successful or whether they get phone number out of you first to call you. Bang your a prisoner of war son, no red cross parcels, just torture by phone and mail. Just do as I do…Wear a green hat and direct traffic. Its as barmy as thinking you’ll get any sense out of a call centre.

My thanks to everyone for their helpful advice and suggestions. My question to anyone invoking the DPA is to ask: “What is at stake that merits the attention of this Act?” The answer seems to be in most cases not a lot. I can quite understand that personal information that could unwittingly give access to one’s bank account or some other aspect of life that could if it fell into criminal hands result in loss of some sort, should be protected. But, neither of those situations apply in my case.

I’m left wondering if there isn’t some element of self iimportance and “empire building” at play here with no one person actually querying whether their procedures are at all necessary and actually work to protect something worthwhile.

John Green

This thread has made me chuckle. As somone who has embraced the PC/internet/online culture completely( 🙂 ), security and safeguarding your information stored on-line is very important. If that requires information to passed over to ensure that you are who you say you are, then fair enough. Let’s face it, we would be the first to complain if our bank accounts were compromised.
As cyber-criminals become more sophisticated then so must the security measures.

As far as local banks and building societies are concerned, those days are far from over. I still bank where I opened my first current account over 30 years ago. My branch is still in the town I came from, I have the phone number of branch but I very rarely use it – I don’t need to. I have managed to conduct my financial affairs for the last 25 years when my “local” branch is hundreds of miles away. My mortgage is with a building society a few miles away, again I have the local branch number and deal with those I need to deal with directly. No problem.

Jay, you are simply wrong.

It is industry standard practice in telephone and Internet banking to ask for 2-3 randomly selected characters from the customer’s password as part of the identity verification process.

Asking for the whole password would be a different matter entirely, but that is not what we are talking about here.

The ICO will help you

Temptation beckoned and I couldn’t resist ! Talk Talk have just written to me citing my correct name and address, going on to mention that they could not because of the Data Protection Act, enter into any discussion regarding my account details until I provided the following:

Full name of account holder
Account number
My address and postcode (see above)
Date of birth
3rd and 6th character of my password
Last four digits of my bank account number known to Talk Talk

They go onto write that unless I provide the above, they cannot enter into any exchange of correspondence which, in any event, must be accompanied by their 12 digit reference number.

I need a drink.

Hi John

You can count on the org in the URL http://www.ico.gov.uk/ to support your arguments and guide you through the mire.

As regards Talk Talk they are completely out of order.
I presume you are a paid customer of theirs.
This means they have your full name, your postal address, your bank details (for DD), your customer ID, your telephone or broadband number, and a whole lot more information you provided them.

What is their problem engaging in correspondence with a bona fide customer to the customer’s known postal address.

They should never ask you for any digits of your password (that is sacrosanct).

My advice is escalate it to a manager level and also ask that they respond in 7 working days.I always get a receipt for posting from the P.O.(indicating so in the my letter) rather than spend on recorded delivery.

In the meantime send a copy of their letter to the ICO and ask if the ICO can guide you.

They will and assign a case officer to your problem.

Talk Talk were in hot water with OFCOM recently over billing and poor service with respect to broadband.

From what you say they are information gathering possibly due to a technical problem on their part. e.g. they may have had a problem on their database requiring a restore from backup media which has been embarrassingly faulty or a ‘roll back’ during a database failure has been incorrect.
These are not your problems and if this is the case they must come cap in hand to you and admit the problem and request submission of your information but not bits of your password.

Hope this helps

Grey Area.

I’ve written by snail mail asking a number of questions relating to your point re DPA. I’ll post the reply – if I get one !

John Green

This sort of thing annoys me.

John – ask your bank which of the Data Protection Principles they consider they would be violating if they dealt with your issue without you first providing all of the information they ask for.

Let us know what they say.

I presume that your bank asked you to provide the answers to a number of “security questions” (eg, mother’s maiden name, name of first pet, etc) when you opened the account.

Correct responses to these questions, together with providing correct DOB and address details should be all of the verification that the bank needs.

So how is it that when the bank calls me they want me to confirm and validate my identity?

My answer (if it is they calling me) is to ask them how I can verify and be sure it is the bank. They are usually stymied by this, and just splutter “well…it is the bank because we are telling you we are the bank!”

At this point I generally terminate the conversation.

We are supposed to verify who we are, which is fair enough, but are expected to take at face value they are the bank because they say they are! To me, that flies in the face of all the bank’s advice about security.

If its important they will doubtless write me one of their semi-literate computer generated impersonal letters – direct from my ‘personal’ account manager.

Temptation beckoned and I couldn’t resist ! Talk Talk have just written to me citing my correct name and address, going on to mention that they could not because of the Data Protection Act, enter into any discussion regarding my account details until I provided the following:

Full name of account holder
Account number
My address and postcode (see above)
Date of birth
3rd and 6th character of my password
Last four digits of my bank account number known to Talk Talk

They go onto write that unless I provide the above, they cannot enter into any exchange of correspondence which, in any event, must be accompanied by their 12 digit reference number.

I need a drink.

It’s the continuously impersonal world we are made to live in

High Street Branch of your bank if it still exists is part of an International Conglomerate.
The ever smiling Captain Mannering (Bank Manager) is no more.
Formerly the Bank Manager knew every regular customer especially their credit risk.
Banks did not do mortgages
They did not sell insurance, etc
Nor did they embrace stock market investments

High Street Branch of your Building Society if it still exists is also part of an International Conglomerate
Building Societies provided mortgages to home buyers. One home not many homes and no buy to rent mumbo jumbo.
Building Societies did not do current accounts and did not do things only banks did.

Now when you telephone any financial agency (bank, building society, insurance company) or utility company you aren’t speaking to anyone in a local branch who knows you. They put you through the hoops in taxing questions which are in fact a complete load of cobblers as if anyone has stolen your identity they would have obtained most of that information as well.

Thank goodness many companies are moving their offshore customer services operations back to Blighty. They have had enough of geographically and culturally inept Asian call centres whose charges are escalating making them much less competitive than some years ago.

Everything local is being closed Post Offices, Banks, Building Societies, Insurance Companies, utility company branches.

It’s not just computers that have caused this mayhem it’s the inept implementation of such systems by often greedy non customer service orientated individuals who rake in hefty bonuses.

If you have local branches of banks, building societies and post offices please frequent them and make them feel they are needed as then their senior regional or head office managers may see fit to leave them in situ.

I had a good laugh a few years ago…
Lady calls me and says this is blah blah from tiscali (allegedly) …and asked to chat about my account…then proceeds to ask me some in depth security questions !!
When I refused to answer them she didnt seem to understand the problem of being called by… (well- could be anybody) and then giving away all your private passwords etc.I told her that the security questions were for me calling them,and she eventually said that she could not discuss anything with me…’suits me’ said I – not wishing to pay any more cash for more services that I dont need 😀

but on the serious side !! the country turned to c**p the day the lottery started

we have mad people believe fabulous wealth is at your fingertips

when in reality the odds are you are going to have to work effin hard and probably for the rest of your life in a job that you either can’t stand or even if you do like it some days you’ll think ” what the f am i doing here “

“

The Pools did the same thing.

These days it’s it’s easier to assume that everyone is guilty of something and the onus is on you to prove otherwise, be it fraud ,theft or outright lying.

i feel that is the dividing line since then everyone has to some degree believed they should have a millionaires life style or be famous

Oh I’ve firmly believed that I should have a millionaires life style even before the lottery came along, already spent the money in my head and everything, isn’t going to happen though. Rather not be famous though, there’s enough rubbish in the papers without anyone wanting to know what I’ve had for lunch.

Call centers do annoy me, number of times I’ve had internet issues and had some dopey idiot on the other end tell me to ‘turn it off and on again’. Even had one poor soul following their sheet somewhere in India who insisted that the reason I had intermittent internet connection speeds at certain times of the day is because I didn’t have a ‘yellow internet cable’ they then proceeded to have one sent out as they were convinced that would fix it. Cable isn’t long enough and the CAT5 I use is fine.

but on the serious side !! the country turned to c**p the day the lottery started

i feel that is the dividing line since then everyone has to some degree believed they should have a millionaires life style or be famous

we have mad people believe fabulous wealth is at your fingertips

when in reality the odds are you are going to have to work effin hard and probably for the rest of your life in a job that you either can’t stand or even if you do like it some days you’ll think ” what the f am i doing here “

we have conditioned a society to being used to thinking millionaire status is but a breath away without having to do anything to achieve it

the amount of young that say ” i want to be a millionaire ” yet as soon as you ask ” what are you going to do to achieve your goal ???” the answer is ” not a clue “

my parents braught me up to believe i could be anybody i wanted to be !!

unfortunately the police view it as identity theft !!!:p

While I can understand the hoops and jumps we have to negotiate to access whatever-account-we-want, it is becoming a real chore to remember the third, sixth and eigth letter of your secret password (which has to comprise numbers as well as letters!).
My wife asked me to help her transfer money online between her two accounts the other day. Now I am usually quite savvy when it comes to working things online but even I was at the point of giving up – user ID, user number, user password all had to be entered.
Things are getting too complicated the more we rely or wish to do things online or over the phone.
What we will do when we have a total meltdown of the interwebnetland I dread to think…

Computers and the internet have been the enablers. The incipient drip of regulation upon regulation, instigated by governments over the past 15 years or so, has been gratefully lapped by civil servants, quangos and public and private institutions happy to increase the bureaucracy which runs our lives. Without computers and the internet it would have been nigh on impossible for it to have happened.

What single event or combination has taken place which has placed a cloud of suspicion over us all, to the point whereby we stand accused by inference of being liars, cheats and imposters ?

Purely and simply computors and the internet, the very same things that we all hoped would ease our lifestyles!

I remember one from a while ago, it went like this…

Phones bank and gets an Indian call centre…..

“Hello can I please be put through to my branch please”…

“Madam this is the XYZ bank call centre I can help you with your requirements”…

“Good, can you put me through to my branch in xyz high street”

“No Madam I will help you, do you require a loan”?

“No I wish to speak to my local branch”…

“Your branch can not tell you anything I cannot do Madam”,

“Then can you please tell me if I left my gloves on the counter when i popped in 30 mins ago and are they still there”?…………

Silence…………………………