A Very Kafka Christmas: Adventures inside the bewildering bureaucracy of My Bank

J R Leach

This is a tale of dystopic woe.

A bureaucratic nightmare.

A glimpse into the Kafkaesque sinkhole lurking at the heart of our automated society.

It began one bright morning in late spring when I noticed my current account’s balance was a little off-kilter—much lower than it should be.

But I’d just been to Greece for a little holiday and eaten my weight in gyros and tzatziki.

Most likely, I had simply spent more than I realised. Oh well. Such things happen. At least I had a good time.

But, as it turned out, this was not the answer. In fact, £700 had gone unaccountably missing.

Looking through my transactions, I discovered a direct debit I had no knowledge of, paid through PayPal, for £647.10.

Further inspection revealed that this was the latest and by far the largest of such payments—eleven in total—going out for the better part of two years.

I hadn’t noticed the ten previous iterations because they were pretty small—£8.99 here, £11.29 there—But altogether, including the most recent £647.10, a total of £1,132.60 had been siphoned from my account by persons unknown.

I did not know how this could have happened.

I called My Bank immediately, and after I was serenaded with a jaunty, albeit repetitive, rendition of Pachelbel’s Canon in D for twenty minutes or so, I informed them of this discovery.

“Scandal, outrage!” I cried in alarm—

“Not to worry, Sir,” said the chipper Mancunian chap, let us call him Mr Derek DeBitte. “Such banditry is common, and we, at this particular financial institute, deal with such avaricious roguery with an iron fist. Verily, I have liberated your hard-earned funds from the clutches of that detestable fraudster. You can rest easy now, sir, for all has been righted in the world, and justice has been well and truly served…”

Or words to that effect.

The total amount of £1,132.60 was then deposited back into my account, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

I wish I could tell you that’s where the story ended.

However, a few days later, one fine Wednesday evening, I received a message around sixish that consisted of a single sentence from my trusty, reliable bank detailing this:

“Nah. That didn’t fly, I’m afraid. We’ve taken the money back. Soz.”

Or words to that effect—-minus the apology.

When I checked my account, the money they had refunded was gone. And I was, in fact, overdrawn.

No further information was supplied, and there was no instruction on what I should do next.

So I called them up the following day and informed them—very politely, given the circumstances—that taking that money back had placed me in an overdraft, incurring fines for every day that negative sum was not balanced.

I was staying away from home at the time, and because of the recent fraud, my debit card AND my PayPal were both frozen. So, with zero money in my account, I was rendered suddenly, for all intents and purposes, utterly penniless in a strange city. If not for friends lending me cash, I wouldn’t have had the funds to buy a train ticket home.

I joke about it, but it was an alarming realisation at the time—how easily I had been cut off from all access to money.

I called up My Bank the next day, in a bit of distress.

“The indemnity claim was rejected, sir,” said a Mancunian lady, who was terseer than the previous chap. Let us call her Annette Gayne. “This is a PayPal issue; we advise you to call them immediately and resolve this. It should be PayPal paying your money back, not us; the payments on our end were all legitimate.”

And I, poor naive sap that I am, believed her.

So I called up PayPal, and of all the music I have ever heard while placed on hold, PayPal’s was the worst. Insipid and grotesquely, toxically positive—it sounded a little like the riff in ‘Walking on Sunshine’, but slower and playing on a 45-second loop.

A literal hour went by like this.

I waited. And I waited. Only to eventually be told by a lovely lady that this is not PayPal’s problem; it was an ‘account issue’. Someone—the mystery fraudster—has taken my bank account information and added it to a separate PayPal account that had nothing to do with me.

And they had been using it to pay for little bits and pieces.

And, of course, because of PayPal’s Fort Knoxian approach to customer confidentiality, they refused to give me the perpetrator’s name.

“She is a PayPal customer, Mr Leach, and therefore falls under our banner of protection. PayPal is not in the habit of giving out our customer’s private information, whether or not they’re who they say they are, and whether or not they’re stealing other customers’ money.”

Apparently, this person defrauding me retained her right to do so anonymously, and I retained no right to get my money back.

So I called again the next day, a devilish twinkle in my eye.

“I can’t find a payment on my transaction history,” I said. “Could you please help me find it? My account number is blah-blah-blah, it was for £647.10.”

This was some top-tier deceit, dastardly—that’s the word for it, and potentially the most exciting thing I had ever done.

“Certainly, sir, it’s right here—”

By god, it’s worked—have I gone too far?

“Was that for Airbnb?” She asked.

“Oh, it could have been. Could you tell me the name linked to that transaction, please?”

The thrill was intoxicating.

“Why yes, sir, of course. We here at PayPal are always happy to remind our customers of their names. It was Miss Fern Blahblahblah—”

I won’t reveal her full name.

And that’s how I discovered someone called Fern had spent my £647.10 on an Airbnb in Amsterdam—the duplicitous harlot was having my dream getaway at my expense!

“Ok,” I said, “actually, that’s not me, nor is it anyone I know.”

“Oh,” said the PayPal customer service assistant. Let us call her Fee. “Oh, that’s very troubling, Mr Leach.”

“Indeed, if only someone had said something. But now that I have that confirmation, would you be a dear and send that info to me in writing?

Fee very politely did as instructed and once again advised that I should get on to MyBank ASAP.

And I did.

And they put their Fraud Prevention Team on it.

What you need to know about the FPT is that they are very, very busy.

So very, very, VERY busy.

Too busy to answer their phones.

Too busy to even have phones.

The first rule of the FPT is that you can’t call them; they have to contact YOU.

And they never ever do.

While waiting for them to get in touch and after A LOT of reading through Reddit forums and probing the citizens’ advice webpage, I – on my own – made a small breakthrough.

Fern, or whatever black-market, shadowy operation she owes her allegiances to, had somehow pilfered my account details in 2015 when I had the misfortune of living in Central London. This was proven when I found an indemnity fee of 0.01p paid into my account.

Through some digital jiggery-pokery I don’t understand, this gave Fern (whoever/whatever she is) access to some of my account information.

This is known as “indemnity fraud”; it is reasonably common, and you might imagine it could be quickly dealt with. After all, I had found quite a bit of information on my own, without any of the vigorous vetting or special ops training I’m sure these mysterious Fraud Prevention professionals go through.

But when I tried to pass this info on to the boys at the FPT, there was only more silence.

Maybe they are so desperately up to their rear ends with preventing fraud that they simply cannot afford the time to deal with any of their customers who are victims of, well, fraud.

Or maybe My Bank’s Fraud Prevention teams’s main tactic in ‘preventing fraud’ is making it next to impossible to report it.

I don’t know. However, I can confirm that the FPT never ever talked to me about my fraud.

And so I was reduced to calling various bemused but well-meaning ordinary staff members and call centre operatives, who did nothing but put me on hold.

You see, by this time, My Bank had accumulated pages of case notes on my claim, and I would have to wait on the phone, twenty minutes, forty minutes, an hour—for whoever I was talking with to read and decipher what was going on.

And every time I talked to someone, I would have to start again from the beginning—again and again and again.

My advice would always be: “I suggest you read from the end upwards, as a lot of the earlier information is unnecessary, and everything you need to know is at the end.”

But this was rarely heeded.

After waiting 20 minutes, I’d be inevitably informed: “Hello, Mr Leach, thank you for your patience; I understand now! It seems your claim was rejected.”

I would sigh and explain, “No. You’re still in July. It would be best to skip to at least September, maybe more. Just keep reading.”

“Ah,” they would say and then disappear again for forty minutes.

Keep in mind I had no record of these notes. Only they did. I had to work entirely from memory of previous conversations.

By the end, I had memorised my responses and created a concise explanation.

“IT IS NOT MY PAYPAL ACCOUNT—MY DETAILS HAVE BEEN USED ON A DIFFERENT ACCOUNT. NO. THESE TRANSACTIONS DO NOT SHOW UP IN MY PAYPAL TRANSACTION HISTORY. NO. I HAVE NOT SHARED MY DETAILS WITH ANYBODY. YES. THIS IS, IN FACT, FRAUD.

CAN I SPEAK TO SOMEONE FROM FRAUD PREVENTION, PLEASE.”

I kept an account of every phone call, and by the end, I had amassed a total of 18.25 hours and counting on the phone between PayPal and My Bank. Most of which I spent on hold.

Every so often, when I called, one of these brave, confused souls would “go away and try something”. These somethings were always vague and would take an arbitrary amount of time to finish, and when they had finished, no attempt was ever made to get in touch with me and inform me of the result.

If I wanted to know, I would have to call—and wait.

Eighteen hours of my life—siphoned off by bureaucracy, never to be seen again.

I could have solved world hunger in that time; if I wanted to, I could have taken up pottery or watched Doctor Zhivago six and a half times or spent a day in a padded cell contemplating the sordid reality of existence, y’know, something fun, which by comparison, could have been anything.

Having my teeth extracted felt more rewarding and took a fraction of the time.

Remember, all this time, I had solid proof of the crime and the name and account details of the perpetrator—yet this made no difference. There was still allegedly nothing either MyBank or PayPal could do to get my money back.

Eventually, and I remember these days as ‘The Days of False Hope’, a would-be hero steps onto the scene—let’s call her Miss Hope Rises.

Hope Rises is a customer service assistant at My Bank, and, in the early days of October, on one of my weekly ‘lets-see-if-those-folks-down-at My-Bank-sort-out-this-whole-fraud-thing’ calls, Hope answered the phone.

“By all that is good and holy, Mr Leach, what you have suffered through is ungodly and unjust. I have informed my manager, and I now lay my sword at your feet and gift you this oath—for as long as I draw breath, I will fight for your cause. From now on, you’ll have access to my email address, and I will personally see to your care and comfort. No more will you have to ring up some nameless customer service assistant like one of the common rabble. I will be stalwart guardian, sir, and you, my blushing damsel.”

“Hope,” I said. “That won’t be necessary. But if you could tell me how to sort this whole fraud thing out, that’d be swell.”

“Righty-o,” she said and got to work. “There is a questionnaire in the post; fill that in, and I’ll whip it over to Fraud Prevention, and we’ll get that money for you—oh, and some compensation for the inconvenience once this is all cleared up!”

“Bloomin’ marvellous work, Hope,” I said. “God bless you in this life and all others.”

A resolution was within my reach.

But the questionnaire never arrived.

The days of The Many Questionnaires had begun.

(I keep using the word ‘questionnaire’ because that is what My Bank uses. I’m unsure why the usual choice of ‘form’ is unsuitable. The questionnaire makes it sound whimsical and fun, as though there will be a Trivial Pursuit angle —which there certainly was, come to think of it.)

Questionnaire the First: Lost in the mail or never sent.

Questionnaire the Second: Delivered a week later, filled in and posted back (1st class and tracked) on the 14th of October. I see that it makes it there safely. I breathe a sigh of relief. And then a month goes by… and I hear nothing.

I called and emailed, and there was no response.

Hope, you have broken my heart.

I return to calling the ‘contact’ number, as listed, and soon return to my familiar pattern of explaining the situation to some clueless My Bank employee who is horrendously out of their element and doesn’t know what to do.

And then, Hope replies!

“Apologies, Mr Leach, we didn’t receive your questionnaire,” she says.

But I saw it. I tracked it. I know it got there. Hope… don’t do this.

“I have sent you another questionnaire,” she concludes, bringing us onto:

Questionnaire the Third: It doesn’t seem to arrive after two weeks.

“Sorry about that, Mr Leach; I have sent another.”

It is at this point I ask: “Why does it have to be a solid, physical copy, handwritten and hand posted when we live in an age of easy communication, emails and phone calls and text messages—how is something so spectacularly concerning to any financial institution, such as fraud, still going through the monotonous rigmarole of standard mail like though it’s 1812?”

I was sure a more modern method of communication would reap some benefit, like a fax maybe? Or a telegram. I’ve even been practising semaphores, just in case.

I sent Hope all the attachments anyway, not waiting for a reply—Word documents and the like, things I had written up since this whole mess started, including the rundown of all the fraudulent transactions on my account and a detailed, dated itemisation of everything that had happened up to that point.

Hope does not respond.

And then arrived Questionnaire the Fourth: Filled in and sent back.

And then, one day, I got a knock at the door. Mr Postman has a letter for me from MyBank, but it hasn’t had the appropriate postage paid.

So I paid £1.50. Opened the envelope

And inside was Questionnaire the Third.

I paid for it.

In this ongoing investigation into my missing money, I paid My Bank for a questionnaire I had already received, filled it out, and returned it TWICE.

And then, I kid you not, out of the blue, Questionnaire the Fifth arrives.

Who is this mysterious stranger?

Is Hope just sending me questionnaires ad infinitum now? Is this just something she does? Is it out of fear? Desire? Frustration? Is Hope trying to teach me some lesson about something I don’t understand?

Hope responds after a month.

“Sorry about the delay. Work is hectic. My Bank Employees cannot open attachments from third-party email addresses, only from internal ‘My Bank’ email addresses.”

And then, as a follow-up…

“If it’s easier, you can just scan a filled-in questionnaire and send it to me by email.”

No.

No, Hope, what fresh madness is this?

You JUST told me that My Bank Employees can’t open attachments from third-party email addresses… and now you’re suggesting I send you an attachment from a third-party email address.

Which, of course, you won’t be able to open.

I point this out in a slightly less antagonistic way.

“Oh, um, sorry, um, Hope, but, um, how can you open an attached scan of the questionnaire, but not the Word documents I sent you earlier? Um, sorry for asking.”

She does not reply.

It is December. Christmas Day.

Hope is still silent. I have sent my questionnaire electronically once and physically twice. They definitely received at least one hard copy and one attachment. I do not know if they received the other hard copy (Questionnaire the Fourth), as I forewent the ‘tracked delivery’ this time, mainly out of a growing, desponding apathy.

Part of me thinks that’s what all this has been for.

To break me. To shatter my resolve.

It’s been six months now. And, like the ghostly calls of a long-dead widow lingering in wait for a husband who shall ne’er return—I still email Hope occasionally.

And when that doesn’t work, I call, as I am well accustomed to by now.

“Do you think those fraud prevention guys will call me soon?” I ask.

They ask, inevitably, about the questionnaire they sent.

“Which one?” I ask.

“The last one,” they reply.

“I filled it in and sent it back a month ago.”

“Then the FPT should be in touch soon,” they tell me. And once, I swear, I even heard one of the more chipper Mancunians laugh when they said it.

I’m still waiting.

I think I might be waiting a while.

JR Leach is a fantasy author and graphic designer whose debut novel The Farmer and the Fald was published earlier this year. You can follow him on Twitter or Substack and see more of his work on his website