Santander scrambles to recover £130m after accidentally paying customers twice

Santander has been forced into a desperate scramble to recover £130million it accidentally paid to tens of thousands of its customers on Christmas Day.  

Some 75,000 payment transactions, at an average of £1,733 each, were wrongly put through twice from 2,000 people and businesses who were set up to send either a one-off or regular payment, with the second payment coming directly from Santander’s own reserves.  

The Spanish-owned bank – which said the blunder was due to a payments’ ‘scheduling issue’ – is now struggling to get its money back because it has been sent to recipients who belong to a litany of other banks such as Barclays, HSBC and NatWest according to The Times.    

Even though the windfall was Santander’s mistake, it is illegal for customers to keep the wrongly accredited money and if they spend it they face being charged with ‘retaining wrongful credit’ under the Theft Act 1968. 

The maximum sentence is 10 years in prison.  

But although those banks are able to take back money that was incorrectly paid into its customers’ accounts, they fear some may have already spent it. 

It is unclear whether Santander is allowed to immediately take wrongly accredited money out of their own customers’ accounts and whether they are allowed to report customers to the police if they have already spent the money. 

Roughly 75,000 people and businesses who were already set up to receive either a one-off or regular payments from 2,000 companies with Santander accounts were wrongly paid twice

The bank will struggle to get their money reimbursed because it has been sent to recipients who belong to a litany of other banks such as Barclays, HSBC and NatWest

One bank said it didn’t want to take money back from a customer if it would force them into overdraft. 

Pay UK, which runs the main payment systems in the UK, is discussing the issue with Santander while the bank desperately tries to recover the money.  

The bank has been using ‘bank error recovery’ to go to various banks or directly to recipients of the cash to get it back.     

A Santander spokeswoman told The Times: ‘We’re sorry that due to a technical issue some payments from our corporate clients were incorrectly duplicated on the recipients’ accounts

‘None of our clients were at any point left out of pocket as a result and we are taking steps to recover the duplicated transactions in line with industry processes.’

The spokeswoman added: ‘The duplicated payments were the result of a scheduling issue, which we quickly identified and rectified. The recipients and purpose of payment will have varied among clients but could have included wages or supplier payments.’

Santander, which has 14million customers, was left in hot water earlier this year in May when it was forced to apologise after a glitch meant some of its customers weren’t able to make any payments for almost an entire Saturday. 

And in August last year thousands of customers were unable to access their online accounts. 

Have you received some unexpected money from Santander? Email isabella.nikolic@mailonline.co.uk