A common and frustrating experience of customers who find their accounts have been frozen is the total lack of information or communication from their Bank. The customer typically calls their bank to find out what is going on. Invariably the Bank says they cannot give out any information but may refer you to their Complaints procedure. This can be very traumatic where the bank has frozen your main or only source of income. The reason why the banks are so silent and frankly unhelpful arises from section 333 Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 which makes it a criminal offence to disclose any information which is likely to prejudice a money laundering investigation. The banks are wary of committing this offence hence they say little to nothing and will often not even tell you that you are being investigated!

However we can turn the bank’s ‘silence’ into a weapon against them to recover your money as follows. The Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 sets out a specific timescale over which the bank may freeze your bank account. In particular they can freeze your account for 31 days and a total of 186 days after the end of this first 31 day ‘moratorium’ period. In our experience a number of banks exceed those timescales and continue their ‘silence’ and non-responsiveness. This means that the bank is no longer acting lawfully as your account remains frozen beyond the permitted timescales. We recently acted for a client whose account had been frozen for more than the permitted 186 days. The bank ignored all our letters before action. We therefore applied for an injunction to unfreeze the account. Consistent with their conduct up to that point the bank did not attend the injunction hearing and maintained their wall of silence. However all we needed to show the court was that we had a case (evidence the funds were legitimate) AND that we had served the bank at their usual place of business. Under Part 6 Civil Procedure Rules ‘service’ can be effected at the usual place of business of a defendant. Once we can show permitted service under the rules the court will deem that the bank was properly served. We were able to produce our Certificate of Service and in those circumstances the court granted our injunction. That was on a Friday. We served the injunction on the (silent) bank on the Saturday and by the Tuesday the bank had transferred our legal costs and contacted us for new account details to transfer the frozen account sums. The funds are now on the way to our client. We did not just get ‘frustrated’ with the bank’s silence but  used the bank’s silence against them to recover funds for our client.

If require legal assistance regarding a frozen account please call us on 0208858 5996 or 07894219314 or email winston.brown@brownandcosolicitors.co.uk