One of the things that makes this topic particularly unpleasant is that you, and a number of others who participate, are fond of making offensive and baseless personal comments as you did here.
Or it could be that they have found an insurance company to assume the risk subject to a long list of exclusions which would almost invariably be invoked.
Santander International are paying me 4.5% interest on a twelve month fixed term deposit right now. Other offshore banks also have accounts that pay interest.
Santander UK have threatened to close my account in exactly the same way two times.
Each time I fought them tooth and nail and each time I won. My account remains open. Indeed the first time they conceded that my account could remain open they compensated me fifty quid for the inconvenience they had caused.
My approach was to write to the CEO ([email protected]).
Of course you will not get a personal reply from the CEO but you will get a reply from Santander Executive Communications who seem to be sentient beings a cut above the average call centre drone. If you can frame your email to the CEO as a complaint so much the better as that will invoke their formal complaints procedure which will create quite a bit more work for them. Thereafter I emailed them almost daily raising new issues, presenting facts and asking questions.
Naturally in your emails you present the best case you can. In my case these included that:
(a) I had held my Santander account for over 40 years
(b) Throughout that time I had maintained the account with complete propriety
(c) All funds paid into my Santander account were from unimpeachable sources.
At the time Santander was my only UK account hence my determination to hang on to it. I now have two other UK accounts as a contingency plan.
I also have offshore accounts which I have had since 2007 but in 2024 I would not recommend going down that route unless you have run out of better options.
An unexpected but welcome development.
About twenty minutes ago I received 13 OTPs at once on my giffgaff phone. These were mostly old ones where I was attempting to log on to my giffgaff account to test whether the OTP system was working on my phone.
Since then I have successfully logged onto my main UK bank account after receiving a OTP from them.
So all good for now. Fingers crossed.