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In a glitch, the UK's NatWest has charged its customers twice when they made debit card payments, forcing some of its clients to be overdrawn and without money.
NatWest's Twitter account was swamped on Tuesday (May 10) by angry customers after the bank mistakenly took off payments twice from their accounts.
The issue affects NatWest debit card transactions. The duplicated transactions appear as both cleared and pending, causing incorrect balances on the accounts.
NatWest confirmed it is aware of the incident and apologised for the glitch.
“Some customer accounts are showing debit card purchases twice, and in certain cases their available balance will be lower than it should, we’re really sorry for any inconvenience,” the bank said on its service status site.
In a Twitter post, NatWest revealed that the incident started several days ago, on May 7, due to a technical issue.
As a result of the error, some of the customers have been left with no money on their accounts or overdrawn.
One client complained that all his money had been taken out of his bank leaving him with nothing, while another one said: “just received a message from you saying that I have gone into my arranged overdraft and may incur charges for using my overdraft.”
The bank assured its clients that if “your available balance is affected by this, we’ll ensure you are not left out of pocket, and we are doing everything we can to fix this as soon as possible”.
“We’ve only made the payment to the retailer once, so there’s no need to contact them.”
As of Wednesday morning, the issue is still ongoing.
NatWest told VIXIO that the glitch only affects a small number of NatWest customers.
"There are around 112,000 NatWest debit card customers impacted which is around 1 percent of all NatWest Group debit card customers," the bank said.
