Not sure if anyone else has had to go thought that but starling placed my transaction as pending while they manually review it. I had to give them answers to several questions.
Annoyingly it’s not even that much less than 2k to a savings account I’ve sent money to before without issue (but never more than 1k before).
It does feel a little backwards I must admit. And the speed at which they’re reviewing them seems to be slow, 1h+ and counting.
I wonder how bad fraud is at starling as well because while answering the questions I had multiple screens warning me about sending money and that it might be a scam etc etc
I think it’s a good thing really. An hour or two isn’t the end of the world and you’d be grateful if you were scammed somehow and they couldn’t take all your money.
I’d agree it’s not a bad thing, but this is an account I already had in my payees and already sent thousands to over time. So from my perspective (and I’d have thought the bank as well) it is an established known account.
A couple of hours I don’t mind. And while typing this it’s now just gone though. So about an hour and a half from the initial payment to starling authorising it.
My fear is if I ever had a time sensitive payment in the future I could be waiting. I’d love a more robust way of marking trusted accounts.
I think there’s so much fear about scams and the actual scams now, that the measures banks put in place cause problems for normal people trying to do normal things.
I know there’s a lot of complaints about Monzo deal with larger payments (£10k+) and getting the approval for them.
Yeah I’ve noticed, starling seem to be a little more on the cautious side, but I’ve seen the warnings elsewhere.
And they’re not wrong. Scams galore, I know of one crypto scam that was just shutdown recently for example. One of thousands, and they scammers just dump the coin and their victims and make a new one anyway.
Maybe CoP will improve this. Marcus bank doesn’t seem to have this in place yet, neither do some other banks but I believe this deadline is next month?
As @anon46977588 said, it’s probably a good thing that the bank is being more proactive in preventing authorised push payment fraud. That said, I think they could do better in terms of identifying potential fraud. As this is an existing payee and you’ve made several payments to the account previously, it’s surprising that it’s been selected for additional checks.
Incidentally @Eden, have you previously confirmed the payee details in the Starling app? That feature was probably introducted after you originally set the payee up. Maybe that’s a factor in why this transaction was selected for additional checks?
I think this was the bit that caught me. Sending 2k to a new payee, absolutely the checks would make sense. But I’ve already sent thousands to this account before
Now as for why it triggered it think maybe a few things. No CoP (I tried but Marcus doesn’t have it yet); the payment was over 1k, all other payments had been under 1k so maybe some threshold; I’d also recently moved money to starling because you can only transfer money via a linked account
The checks though I feel could have been pre applied to the account. It was basically asking me where the money was going (my account), what it was for (saving into my savings account), and I think a couple of questions about not sending money to people or something.
Things I recon could be marked on a ‘trusted’ account. But maybe that has its own fraud issues. Maybe when CoP is fully rolled out the idea of a trusted account may be more viable.
It just seemed a little old school, ‘there must be a better way’ to do this is what popped into my head
Never had an issue with Starling, even with £10k+ payments. HSBC are a different kettle of fish. New Freetrade account - payments held, new Atom account - payments held, buying premium bonds - payment held.
Gets a bit tiresome after a while. At least HSBC are moving towards releasing the payment in-app rather than having to call their Fraud team.
