In February 1992 Kelman got a call from Sheila MacKenzie, head of the Consumers' Association (which publishes Which? magazine), who said that members were complaining by the dozen about phantom withdrawals, and was he interested? Kelman was, and met MacKenzie, with two of the association's members, Mr and Mrs McConville from Liverpool, who had had a number of phantom withdrawals from their Barclays account. He got interested in computing in the 1980s when the National Computing Centre asked him to advise the Midland Bank on its computer system. Kelman at that time was a barrister (who argues cases in front of a judge, rather than only slogging away in legal chambers) specialising in intellectual property law. "Phantom withdrawals" were a big mystery when the banks and building societies began to join their ATM networks together in the 1980s.
What you're about to read comes from the documents he submitted last week to the High Court, pursuing his claim to payment.
And now that junior barrister, Alistair Kelman, wanted to get paid for thousands of pounds of work that he did under legal aid, when he was running a class action on behalf of more than 2,000 people who had suffered "phantom withdrawals" from their bank accounts. The reason you're hearing it now is that, with Chip and PIN cards finally in widespread use in the UK, the risk of the ATM network being abused as it was has fallen away. This is the story of how the UK banking system could have collapsed in the early 1990s, but for the forbearance of a junior barrister who also happened to be an expert in computer law - and who discovered that at that time the computing department of one of the banks issuing ATM cards had "gone rogue", cracking PINs and taking money from customers' accounts with abandon.
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