“I lost my inheritance with one wrong digit on my sort code”
This is kind of shitty, but once the situation occurred (due to the stupid and IMHO inexcusable situation of &quot;An oddity in Teich’s case is that Barclays also appeared to have identical account numbers for two different customers&quot;) there really aren&#x27;t good solutions of the (unintended) recipient disputes the reversal and claims that that&#x27;s money intended for them.<p>All the things he initially asked Barclays to do were refused not because they didn&#x27;t want to do that, but because Barclays can&#x27;t do that. They can&#x27;t return the money without a court order (in these particular circumstances the payment was &quot;executed correctly&quot; according to the legal criteria, because the payment was intended to be sent to that account number and was credited to the matchign account number, so any uf the more common justifications of error-fixing can&#x27;t apply. But the payment laws pretty much implicitly assume that the account numbers are unique, and they weren&#x27;t in this case), so if the recipient disagrees, then either it goes to court or the money stays there.  Furthermore, revealing the account holder&#x27;s identity would be a crime under banking secrecy laws - again, a court order was needed for that, it&#x27;s not something that Barclays is allowed to do at their discretion.<p>What does seem ugly is the obscene legal costs - it should not take 12000 and 34000 pounds to submit a simple claim to the court that (as far as I understand) was not even contested.