Credit crunch

There must be something seriously rotten in the banking system. Last week I bought four tickets to fly from City to Budapest, via Zurich. The grand total was slightly over £500... nothing out of the ordinary.

A couple of hours after completing the transaction online, the phone rang. A weird automated voice went along the lines of "Hello, this is xxx (name of bank) Security Services. Press any key to continue". Of course I hang up. Isn't it the first bit of advice you get this day and age of online fraud and identity theft and what have you -- never, ever respond to unsolicited, automated messages.

But they didn't give up. Another call came an hour later, then they started ringing my mobile, eventually leaving an automated message instructing me to call them back. I checked the number against my bank statement. It was different. Hmmm.. very suspicious.

In the end, I called the customer service number in the statement only to find out it was genuinely them, trying to contact me to check if I really, really wanted to buy those Swissair tickets. After answering a very large number of absolutely ridiculous security questions, they finally believed it was me ... and that I did want to buy the tickets. And they told me, as if they were doing a huge favour, that they could now unblock their Fraud Prevention System ... Excellent. Does that mean the payment has now gone through? No. no no, far from it. You have to buy the tickets again. What???

Apparently, if a payment is blocked, there's no way they can unblock it, as it were. All they can do is deactivate their wretched monitoring system, so you'll no longer get hourly automated phone calls ... I mean what the ****? If one of the four big high street banks creates such a fuss about paying an airline £500 -- something I do at least three times a year with this credit card -- I can believe the financial system is crumbling.

I go back to swissair.com... in the meantime, the total price of the tickets has gone up by £100 .. back on the phone to my bank. Your Fraud Prevention System has caused me a loss of £100 .... But Ms B, you have to understand it was in your own personal interest... That's the final straw. Banks ARE going nuts. No wonder they're all going bust if they behave like complete idiots ...