Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Sentinel Credit Card Insurance

I just got my credit card bill & my credit card insurance with Sentinel was due last month.

They charmingly have taken £70 on the 23rd & double dipped on the 29th for a further £70. After the normal 15 min on hold I was told it was a "billing error" & they would be refunding me sometime soon. I told him in English we call it theft!

What a nice way to improve their cash position at my expense.
If you are also a customer of theirs I suggest you check you weren't affected.

I had basically to spend another 15 mins on the phone to my caredit card company to get the second payment stopped. This was tricky as because they are the same amount buton different days they aren't a duplicate transaction.

Does anyone else use a different service & have a better experience?

Hi John,

Working in the payments industry, I'll try and pass on some tips.

First - Sentinel are backed by Cornhill - they are a big company with a decent reputation, so there is no way this is deliberate. Just an innocent co*k up - probably someone loading the wrong file, or same file 2 days running. It happens, people make mistakes. Sure someone is probably getting a kicking for it.

As for the policy itself - 70 seems a high price to pay for card insurance? I pay aroudn £24 a year, and thats purely for a (bank provided) service to register all my cards / passport etc so I can cancel them all with one call should I lose my wallet / get robbed abroad. Most of the cover, that policies like Sentinel offer, is already provided by credit card issuers and your standard house insurance. So unless you've got cover on a very valuable wallet that houses it all, or cover for carrying several grand in cash then it's perhaps worth checking that you are not just buying cover from them when you are already covered by other policies.

Tony,
being a cynical Operations Director I am always suspicious especially when if such an event happens the CS team don't at least proatively call.

The 70 folding pictures of HM covers 3 years so it is not too bad.

Seems about right then

As for the screw up, you're probably the first person to notice - it's suprising how many people these days never check their statements.

Although from the outside it's tempting to this that it's the company trying it on, the reputational damage that being caught doing something like this (and it's a high likelyhood of being caught) would destroy an insurance company / bank more quickly that just about anything else. Bar except exposure to bad morgage debt...

Not Barclaycard by any chance... I had a £70 payment first credited, and then debited twice thereafter on the same day by them...


The fun and games we have with big faceless companies - I've had a company (ScottishPower) debit money from my account to pay someone else's energy bill (nice!). They kindly even gave me the person's address (slight data protection issue there) and then accused me of pulling a fast one by demanding the money back, as my "account wasn't even in credit". Interesting point to note is that I pay by direct debit - with the amount being decided by... guess who... ScottishPower... At that point I informed them I would report them to the police for theft, which did the trick.

In the end they gave me my money back immediately together with interest, all call expenses and a gesture of goodwill for the inconvenience.

Maybe you should try and get them to at least reimburse you for your troubles! Good luck!