Ffrees customers: payments in and out of account hit by ‘technical issues’

Prepaid account provider Ffrees has apologised after a failure meant many payments made between Tuesday (1 May) and Thursday had failed.

This article was published in 2018

Ffrees customers need to urgently check their account status after a technical fault has meant many transactions could have failed without them realising.

The prepaid account provider, which suffered a security breach a while back, has placed a message on customers’ online accounts, warning that a “technical issue” between Tuesday and Thursday this week meant payments into and out of their account could have bounced.

The message, which you can see at the end in full, explains that “banking transactions submitted between 9.45am on Tuesday 1st May and 6pm on Thursday 3rd May” have been affected.

“Any credits that were expected… have unfortunately been returned to the sender,” it said.

Likewise, “any outgoing payments that were scheduled to leave your account on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday up until 6pm will not be paid, although they will currently be showing as having left your account.”

It said these would arrive back in accounts by midday today (4 May).

“You will therefore need to make these payments again.”

A lack of clarity

While it is good to see the issue is being resolved, it has to be said there has not been a great deal of communication about the incident.

Indeed, I am a Ffrees cardholder and the first I knew of the issue was when finance blogger SkintDad mentioned it on Twitter.

I then logged into my account to see the text “Service Status Announcement” written on the page just below the main navigation.

You can see the screengrab below and, in my personal opinion, it could probably be made more visible.

Only when clicking on that did I come across the full details of what went wrong and when.

I rang them to ask what has happened and what's being done to keep customers informed.

The response I've received so far is as follows, which doesn't really address the issue of whether people are being kept informed.

“Over the past few days, we have experienced technical difficulties that have impacted some of our services and prevented banking payments reaching or leaving our customers’ accounts. We have now resolved the issue, with customer account functionality fully restored.

“We appreciate the inconvenience this has caused our customers and thank them for their patience. Our support team is on-hand to deal with any on-going queries or concerns they might have.” 

It must be said that I very rarely use my Ffrees card, but there are others out there who use it as their primary account, so this issue could have a big impact – especially if they don’t yet know about it.

As promised earlier, below is the text in full provided by Ffrees about the issue on their site. If you've been affected please do get in touch on uknews@lovemoney.com or post a comment in the section below. 

Payment Processing

The technical issues experienced over the last few days have now been resolved for new payments into and out of customers’ accounts since 6pm yesterday evening (Thursday 3rd May). All debit and credit banking transactions are being processed in the usual way.

The banking transactions submitted between 9.45am on Tuesday 1st May and 6pm on Thursday 3rd May, have been affected in the following manner:

Credits into accounts:

Any credits to your account, received from 6pm Thursday 3rd May will be processed as normal.

Any credits that were expected over the last few days (between Tuesday morning at 9:45am and Thursday evening at 6pm) have unfortunately been returned to the sender. If any credit that you were expecting is not yet showing on your account, we advise you to contact the sender to arrange for it to be resent.

Payments out of accounts:

Any outgoing payments that were scheduled to leave your account on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday up until 6pm will not be paid, although they will currently be showing as having left your account.

These will be recredited to your account on Friday by 12noon. You will therefore need to make these payments again.

Any outgoing payment scheduled after 6pm on Thursday (3rd May) will be processed as normal.

Once again, please accept our apologies for this and for the inconvenience caused.