THE Royal Bank of Scotland has been taking hundreds of complaints a day from customers who are upset at being charged high and unexpected fees by payday loan middlemen.
RBS, which also owns the NatWest and Ulster Bank brands, has been receiving as many as 640 calls a day from vulnerable consumers about attempts to charge fees on their accounts.
It has seen more than one million attempts made by payday loan brokers to claw money out of people's accounts in the space of just one month.
RBS said it was working with regulators and other organisations to put unscrupulous payday brokers, which charge borrowers a fee to potentially find them a deal, out of action.
Often, the person looking for a payday loan wrongly assumes the middleman is a lender. The financial ombudsman has also seen large volumes of complaints about payday loan middlemen from people who have had money drained from their accounts.
In one of the most shocking cases seen by RBS, someone looking for a £100 loan ended up being charged £700 because their details were passed around 10 different middlemen.
It said that for every payday loan a customer takes out, they are usually charged two to three times by brokers.
Terry Lawson, head of fraud and chargebacks at RBS and NatWest, said: "We are working with the industry to raise awareness of these practices and in many cases halt some of the merchants' operations."
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