Scottish Widows Complaint: PO-14071
Involving fraudulent evasion of pension encashment by SW, and its brazen cover up by TPO
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This page chronicles my attempts to obtain a lump sum from Scottish Widows Personal Pension Plans P56879Q & N80803X. It contains the complete correspondence with Scottish Widows over this period.
On 8/9 November, Scottish Widows made five telephone calls including three voicemail messages to my partner's house (this is where the interview of 5 April took place, as there is no landline at my house). All times are local time (GMT-6). On 8 November, they called at 0512 and 0545 in the morning, and at 1845 in the evening; they left voicemails on the first and third calls. The obtuse disregard shown by the first two calls is characteristic, but I had to check that the third really was at 0045 UK time. On 9 November, they called at 0657 and 0826, with a voicemail on the first call only. My partner was not present when any of these calls were made. She does not speak English and understood little of what was said in the messages. But I suspected when she told me on 8 November about the first two calls that it was likely to be from Scottish Widows, given the inappropriate hour and that it was in English. So, after having been told about a further three calls and two messages, I went to her house in the city today to record these messages and put them on the record for The Pensions Ombudsman. I also sent an email to notify TPO of this (foolishly believing at that time that TPO was the impartial and law-abiding organisation that it claims to be). No doubt due to my hearing problems, I could not discern parts of these messages; however it appears that they want me to call them back. But they should have understood from both my complaint of 10 July and my email of 17 July why it is not reasonable to expect me to discuss this complaint by telephone. I had also notified them by email on 29 September that, having issued their Final Response, this complaint is now in the hands of The Pensions Ombudsman. I subsequently put some effort into determining what was said in these voicemail messages, including using digital signal processing to reduce the speed and change the pitch. The key phrase given as the reason for making the calls (repeated in two messages) was And, although they seemed desperate to contact me, I received no follow up or explanation of any kind, even though I pursued the matter. With hindsight, I am practically certain that these calls were made in response to contact by TPO, with the aim of avoiding having to pay TPO a substantial sum to bury my case. But, as I did not respond, they did the lucrative (for TPO) deal shortly before 23 November 2016 - see here. |
Postscript
This is the end of my correspondence with Scottish Widows. The last two emails I sent to Scottish Widows remain unanswered, despite their having responded promptly (although inappropriately) to all my previous emails. And to be surer of a response, I sent both these emails to two addresses: their general portal and Specialist Complaints
.
That I have still received no response to my list of questions of 29 September, despite their serious implications, indicates that Scottish Widows cannot answer them to their advantage.
The lack of response to my email of 23 November indicates that they are not willing to put in writing any of what they were going to say over the telephone, or even offer any explanation of why they found it necessary to make these calls. But perhaps this was not surprising in any case, as it seems that they by then had the protection of TPO...