I like the Barclaycard (I think) fraud thing.

You get called by a computer that asks you to identify yourself by picking a piece of personal information from a list. It might ask for the month and date of your birth, for example, and give you 5 options.

Because there are 365 possible month + date combinations, and yours appears in the list, you know they already have this information so you're safe to confirm it, and they also get to confirm that you are (likely) who they're intending to talk to.

Yeah, I was pleasantly surprised by this too! I had the birthday, an address, and something about one of my standing orders that I had to pick from. It was nice to not have to explain yourself to a real person either. You just had to confirm whether the transactions were real ones. I just have a normal Barclays account, too, nothing special.

That's easy to solve, if they get confused when you ask for proof, just ask them for a number you can call them back on and the reason they're calling. However, it's easy enough to type, but harder to remember to do in practice though.

Oh, I call them back on the number that I have in my address book. I just want them to never do it again. To anyone. It s a bad practice that serves only to condition users into giving out personal information to any random person calling up and pretending to be from a bank.