Whistleblower claims – “Employees at RBS being trained to lie”

According to an insider from the Royal Bank of Scotland employees at the bank are being trained to lie in order to stop customers from cancelling the Payment Protection Insurance on their credit cards. The whistleblower is apparently from the bank’s Customer Loyalty Team, and said that employees are trained to use a number of practices to stop customer from cancelling PPI on their credit cards.

The report claims that when customers call to cancel their cover the staff member tells them that they will be transferred to another department. The call is then passed to the person sitting next to the staff member, who then puts the customer on hold for five minutes. The aim of this is to hope that the consumer will simply get fed up and hang up. However, if they do not then the staff member tells them that they cannot cancel the cover unless they pay off the credit card balance and cancel the account.

The report further claimed that member of staff were paid £5 in the form of a tax free shopping voucher for stopping the consumer from cancelling their PPI policy. For stopping a customer from closing a current or savings account the payment is only £1.

The whistleblower, who addressed the issue with senior members of staff, said that nothing was done and stated: ‘I believe the whole process is dishonest and unethical and I refused to take part in it.’

Two other members of the team also backed up the claims made by the whistleblower and a complaint has been made to the Financial Services Authority. Officials from RBS have commented that the matter is ‘the subject of an ongoing investigation’.

Tags: call, consumer, rbs, cancel accounts, authority, Credit card, ongoing investigation, ppi