Cynical Lloyds salesmen hoping to squeeze more money out of their customers are flouting laws designed to protect them from nuisance calls. A whistleblower at the bank has revealed how staff are forced to ‘cold call’ customers even if they have registered for the Telephone Preference Service to prevent them from being hassled. Cash-strapped customers who have breached their overdraft limits are seen as prime targets for the bank, with salesmen phoning them up to encourage them to take on more debt. The latest revelation about bad behaviour at the bank will cause acute embarrassment to Lloyds, which will today announce its latest three-year plan – which is expected to result in thousands of job cuts as it closes more branches in a major shift to online and mobile banking. The strategy will be unveiled alongside its results for the three months to the end of September. The revelations also emerge as the Government prepares to announce new laws designed to end the scandal of nuisance marketing calls and text messages. Last night the state backed lender came under fire from a senior MP who said the bank’s ruthless sales tactics appear to be ‘hard wired into its DNA’. More than 20m people in the UK have signed up to the free Telephone Preference Service, which enables individuals to opt out of receiving unsolicited sales calls by registering their home landline and mobile phone numbers.

But instead of making these customers off limits, Lloyds orders employees to call them and use a carefully worded sales script to avoid breaking the law. Customers who have asked the bank not to make sales calls are also being harassed on their home and mobile phones by Lloyds employees. Internal documents handed to the Mail show the pressure exerted on staff at the UK’s biggest bank to sell products to customers and invade their privacy. A Lloyds employee, who is a senior personal banking adviser at a London branch, says: ‘The whole process is very devious. We contact these customers under the pretext that it is a service call – and we are trying to help them......Read more here