Irvine student seeks compensation from bank

Jan 9 2009 by Eric McGowan, Irvine Herald

Donald Moffat

AN IRVINE student who was stunned to find his bank account £100billion overdrawn this week denied he was being greedy for seeking compensation for the blunder.

Donald Moffat, 38, wants £100 “at the very least” for stress caused by the administrative error by Barclays.

He claims he was physically sick after logging on to his online account on December 30 and spotting two £50bn withdrawals.

Barclays apologised for the mistake – which was corrected within an hour – and offered him £10 as a goodwill gesture.

But dad-of-two Mr Moffat, of Fleming Terrace, described the offer as “ridiculous” and has written to the bank TWICE asking that they improve the offer.

This week, as the story made headlines around the world, Mr Moffat denied he was trying to cash-in on the error.

“It’s obvious to me that anyone in my position would do the same, he said. “I was physically sick with the stress of this, it was affecting my wife and kids.”

Mr Moffat, a computing student at James Watt College in Kilwinning, said he noticed the £100bn balance when he and wife Wendy, 41, logged on to check they had enough money in the bank to pay for the MoT on their car.

He added: “At first I thought I had been the victim of fraud but then I realised someone at the bank had obviously made a big mistake.

“We knew we still had quite a bit left in the account as we checked the night before and everything was okay.

“The next morning I went out to get a few things then, when I came back, my account was overdrawn by that amount.

“My wife said she had never seen that many numbers on a bank account. She did not know how to pronounce it never mind anything else.”

Mr Moffat, who is also a part-time care worker, said he had been passed from pillar to post after making the error known to Barclays.

But his compensation bid attracted widespread criticism on online news forums around the globe.

One poster, Dave Henderson of Country Durham, said: “It should be obvious to anyone that this was a clerical error as opposed to fraud. If that had happened to me I would have contacted the bank for sure but would have had a good laugh about it. To say he was physically sick is very dramatic.”

In a statement Barclays said: “A technical error caused some customer accounts to be incorrectly debited.

“The problem was immediately identified and corrected within less than an hour, and all affected customer accounts are now showing correct balances.

“No customers will be financially impacted by this error. We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused our customers.”