Should banks have a duty of care?

I don't expect the banks to take responsibility for me, they are not there to control my irresponsible behaviour. I did a stupid thing and I have to take the consequences.

What I do find odd is how in the past I have gone out Christmas shopping with my wife when the children were younger and we would end up using the credit card for multiple transactions. Quite often they would not be huge individual purchases (maybe between £10-£50 each) and well within our credit limit but for a couple of years running when we got towards the end of the day we have our card refused and when I spoke to the card company when stood in the shop, they said sorry, it is just that your spending was out of your normal routine of only perhaps 3 or 4 transactions a day at the most, so we just wanted to check everying was alright. We are your friendly bank just looking out for you.

Constrast this to me depositing £250 to a online casino website eight times in one gambling binge in the early hours of one morning until I hit my credit limit. This did not seem to register as unusual to my bank's automated systems.

I think the moral is, there is no-one out there who is going to protect you, the gambling industry, the government, the banks, the payday lenders, they all have fingers in the pie and are quite happy to turn a blind eye when they make so much money out of our reckless behaviour.

You got to do it for yourself using whatever willpower, blocks, friends/family you can use to assist.

The banks didn’t clock my husband’s dealings with our children’s accounts. Worse, when I asked for copy statements first time round, they wouldn’t give them to me - data protection. I had ID and birth certificates, the works, the clerks were looking at their screens and they could see what had been going on...but the accounts were in my husband’s name, not mine, so Data Protection.

Each person has to look after themselves out there, even kids.

CW.

We have to realise that banks are there to create money from debt through interest charges and to play the overnight and future money markets with any deposits we have.

I find it strange that they wouldnt flag up a customer with a string of online gambling transactions. They all have their hand in the same pie and credit card companies dont actually like people who pay off a small balance every month. It costs them money to provide the card transactions.Thats why they are always upping limits to allow temptation to grab hold and draw the customer into a regular interest payment. The calculation is that they know there will be a percentage of defaulters but its still a huge money making scheme as most will keep paying through obligation and fear.

Even when they get rapped knuckles and a compensation fine like the shop recently in the news....... its still a huge money making scheme that they have calculated the odds on just like the gambling industry

Ive worked in a bank and they love employing someone to go down a sheet of all the "naughty" customers. It equals lovely lolly for them as they hit all the people on that list with late or o/d fees.

The adverts that they are "by your side" are stretching the limits of credibility. Beyond their own risk assessment, they dont care how you spend or totally waste the money.

I feel that the banks should have a registered scheme to block all gambling transactions but the banks are not on our side and never really have been.

Best wishes to everyone on the forum