Santander accidentally pays out £130m to 1,000s of customers

Santander accidentally paid out a whopping £130 million to thousands of individuals and businesses on Christmas day due to “technical issues”.

Around 75,000 people and companies had mistakenly had money deposited into their accounts on Christmas day.

The massive blunder happened after one-off and regular payments were made twice from 2,000 business accounts, according to the Mirror.

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It was not just Santander accounts where the money was deposited.

Account holders at Barclays, HSBC, NatWest, Co-operative Bank and Virgin Money all received the cash as part of wages or money from suppliers.

Because the money had been sent to accounts at rival banks, Santander has been forced to communicate with other lenders in order to recover it.

But it may be difficult to recover all the cash since many customers who received the double payments could have already spent it.

The Times, who originally reported the incident, stated that some banks are reluctant to hand the money back as it could lead to customers entering into their overdrafts.

Santander is also said to be approaching individual customers directly to get the money back while also talking to rival banks.

Meanwhile, Pay UK, which runs the main payment systems in the UK, will be holding talks on how to reverse the payments.

Some of the money has apparently been recovered by Santander, although it is not yet clear how much.

Because the money sent in error could have come from the lender’s own reserves and not customer accounts, reportedly, this means Santander customers will not be out of pocket due to the glitch.

Currently, Santander has over 400 physical bank locations spread across the UK.

A spokesman for Santander said: “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 will be working hard with many banks across the UK to recover the duplicated transactions over the coming days.”