Fuddland
At long last, everything that got all messed-up by the mugging has been set right: all the money which was taken from my cards has been reimbursed, and I have a working ‘phone.
In fact, because during the two-faulty-‘phones palaver I also wrangled an extra replacement battery from the insurance company, I could say that I’m £30–£50 up [depending on from where you try to buy the same battery].
To be honest, I was a bit surprised it took this long to sort out the financial stuff; of the three institutes involved — Citibank, Smile and Nationwide — only the latter credited my account without much bother. I just had to verbally verify with their fraud department which transactions were fraudulent. Citibank were rather slow to send out the relevant forms that they required me to sign, but got there in the end, only for me to discover they’d reimbursed the two cash withdrawals and the attempted transaction, totalling about £295, but not the £10 worth of “cash advance fees” that said withdrawals incurred. [A £5 charge every time you withdraw cash using a credit card? No wonder I’ve never done it myself!] A quick call later and they’re waiving those fees too.
If you’d asked me before all of this happened which of these three companies had the best customer service, I’d have said it was Smile without hesitation, but after experiencing the workings of their fraud department, I’m not so sure. For some reason, whenever they wanted to talk to me about the incident, they’d send me a letter asking me to call them. This was apparently preferable to attempting to call me themselves, or sending a secure email to my account [which triggers a normal email telling me to visit the site and read the secure message]. After a couple of weeks of silence I contacted them again, via a secure message this time so as not to waste any more money waiting on hold, and the reply asked me to confirm information I’d already confirmed to them over the ‘phone. This warranted a rather narked response from me, and this weekend I see the money has been credited back to my account [but without a reply to my message, so far].
But the best news came in a call from the investigating officer this morning: one of the numbers that the idiots called from my ‘phone just before I had it blocked belongs to someone “known” to the police. I’m not sure what their next step is — as the officer said, he’s not likely to instantly drop his mates in it — but there is the small possibility that it was one of the muggers themselves, calling their own number from my ‘phone, so perhaps I’ll be called in for a line-up kind of thing. It’s certainly a step closer to catching the bastards.
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