I am writing with regard to warning other readers and French bank account holders in that I have had problems with my French Bank. I opened a joint account with my wife Jo approximately four years ago after purchasing a small property in limousine. We deposited 10000 Euro in this account to pay for bills, Taxes and the general running costs of the property. In the September of 2006 we received a phone call from our French bank the first contact that we had had with the bank in the previous three years and my wife was told that the account was 1500 Euro overdrawn. My wife was amazed at this as was I . I immediate checked the last statement and discovered that the account should have been 5000 Euros in credit, We had however not received a statement for some time May 2006 in fact, this was not unusual as we never used the account in the U.K. and only ever received statements after a withdrawal. I then telephoned our French bank to request up to date statements. These I received 2 -3 days later. On inspection I discovered that all of the monies in the account had been withdrawn over a two month period from June 2006 through to August 2006 within the U.K. amounting to nearly 141 Euros a day. We then contacted our French bank stopping the account and contacted the Police who duly took details and statements. To cut a long story short the police passed the information on to the fraud squad who investigated the withdrawals and after a time we where told that My wife’s card had been Cloned. It turned out that Jo had used the card to withdraw a small amount of cash at a local A.T.M. in New Milton and this must have been where it was Cloned. The police had been in contact with our French bank and duly sent the report to them directly. As you can imagine we had been frantic with worry, so where somewhat relived after being told by our French bank that we would be reimbursed. This however is not now the case as we have just been informed 5th Feb 2007 that our French bank are not going to reimburse us for our loss. We are both stunned by this as we would like to know firstly why it was never brought to our attention earlier that the card was being used in an abnormal manner as would be the case in the U.K. Secondly how the account was allowed to go overdrawn with no consent from me or my wife (I thought that this was illegal in France) Why our French bank seem not to believe the British Police that the money was stolen. Why it has taken 5 months for the bank to make a decision We are very disappointed with the way that we have been treated by our French bank and so any advise that readers can give would be very gratefully received
