When Shirley-Anne and Russell Hodgson received £72,000 from Scottish Widows on two life insurance policies set up by his mother in 1972, they were delighted.

The couple had secured the money after a two-year battle with the insurance company, during which Shirley-Anne says her requests for information were repeatedly ignored.

But what they didn’t know then in March 2024 was that they had been severely underpaid – and had received just a tenth of the £750,000 they were really owed. 

Shirley-Anne and Russell are the latest victims of the customer service failings at Scottish Widows that Money Mail sounded the alarm on in 2023.

Astonishingly, three years later, readers tell us they still face many of the same problems. 

Scottish Widows says customer complaints are at a low and it has cleaned up its act since it faced a backlog of cases in 2024.

But readers say they still face hour-long call times on hold and are given incorrect information about their pensions and insurance policies, such as wrong balances and being underpaid. Many customers complain of rude, dismissive staff and of information being lost.

In the Hodgsons’ case, Scottish Widows has made a catalogue of errors that have yet to be fully resolved. Shirley-Anne, 75, and Russell, 71, who live in Auckland, New Zealand, got a letter out of the blue in 2022 informing them they were trustees of two ‘whole of life’ policies each worth £34,000 with insurance company Clerical Medical, now owned by Scottish Widows, opened in 1972 by Russell’s mother.

When she died in July 2023 the couple put a claim in. But Shirley-Anne says she soon gave up after struggling to get any answers. 

She was told to correspond via letters, not emails – despite being in New Zealand. She says: ‘They gave us the runaround, saying they’d get back but never calling or emailing.’

In March 2024, Russell was told he needed surgery to treat his cancer and would need two drugs – one fully funded by the healthcare system while the other would cost $85,000 NZD (£37,000).

‘It became urgent to get hold of the money sitting in that policy. I was constantly thinking about what I could do to get the money,’ Shirley-Anne says. 

‘I was about to give up but I stumbled on a Facebook group full of complaints against Scottish Widows and asked the group administrator Mark Radin for help.’

Since starting his Scottish Widows Complaints Forum in 2024, Mark has championed those caught in a customer service meltdown at the company. 

The retired American businessman has taken on one of Britain’s biggest insurers and estimates he has won back more than £5million for hundreds of customers.

Scottish Widows has told Money Mail it does not recognise this figure. But Mark, from South Carolina, says otherwise. 

‘More and more people keep joining the Facebook group I set up and the cases are getting increasingly frustrating. As one of the biggest pension and insurance providers, they can and should do better.’

Mark’s dogged pursuit of justice was sparked in 2018 when he and British wife Mandy raised a complaint about their pensions – and discovered they had been underpaid. 

‘They wouldn’t give us any answers for what we believed were hidden fees and extremely poor investment performance,’ he says.

It was only after he intervened on Shirley-Anne’s behalf that Scottish Widows paid out £72,000 on the two policies.

However, Mark disputed the payment as he believed the couple were owed more. Shirley-Anne says: ‘He [Mark] rang me one day and asked me to sit down. He said we were actually owed almost £750,000. I said you have got to be kidding, it felt like we’d hit the jackpot.’

Scottish Widows had made an error and eventually paid out £749,397 in September 2024.

Shirley-Anne says she never received an apology or explanation about the discrepancy. The money has gone towards Russell’s immunotherapy treatment and last month the pair went on a long holiday to Australia.

But Mark claims the couple are owed a further £10,000, which was deducted for tax reasons. 

As the couple are not UK residents, he argues they do not have to pay this tax. When contacting HM Revenue & Customs, Shirley-Anne was told they don’t have a record of the payment from Scottish Widows.

A spokesman said: ‘We’re sorry that we didn’t provide the correct information when we should have and we’ve paid Mr and Mrs Hodgson compensation for the hassle caused.’

At any one time, Mark has up to 30 cases on the go and has become infamous at the company. He even has T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan ‘policing private pensions’.

Another customer he has helped is Kelly Sutton, who was cruelly led to believe by Scottish Widows that her father Michael had lied about owning a pension.

Kelly, 42, says he had always told her he had a pot of money saved for retirement and that he had set aside some of it for her. 

She says: ‘Ever since I was a child, he would talk about his Scottish Widows pension. He often said, “don’t worry, Kelly, you will have a little something when I pass”.’

When Kelly, who works for an IT recycling company, went to visit her father one day in 2014, she discovered he had died in his sleep aged 69. ‘It was a huge shock as we had no warning,’ she says.

She contacted Scottish Widows to claim her father’s money to pay for the funeral. ‘The phone conversation did not go how my father had promised,’ she says.

Kelly was told no policy existed under his name – and that she actually owed Scottish Widows £341.07 – which they said had been overpaid to her father. ‘I got off the call and threw up. My dad was now held in a morgue until I could pay for a funeral. I was so angry at him for lying to me.’

Michael had not left a will so there was no way of checking if this was true. She says: ‘Eventually I found the cheapest way to cremate my father. You have to call a company which chooses a crematorium at random, for a service you cannot attend and they get UPS to deliver the ashes like an Amazon order.’

Nine years later, in 2023, Kelly received a text from Scottish Widows asking her to call the customer helpline as there was an account open in Michael’s name.

She faced another battle to get answers, but after many calls found her father did indeed have a pension policy and she was owed £78,000. She says: ‘Most people would be ecstatic to inherit some money – well, sorry, I am not.

‘Please tell me how I get my dad back from the ashes to give him a funeral he deserved with a grave and a headstone that we can visit.

‘I can’t forgive myself for the way I had to send my dad off.’

Kelly says she made 25 phone calls, each lasting around an hour, but was offered no help. And after months of waiting for correspondence, she received a letter addressed to her father.

‘I had been conversing with them for well over a month about his death and they send a letter addressed to him. It’s cruel, unkind and heartless. The people I spoke to were remorseless. For years, Scottish Widows ruined the memory of my father. Now I know my dad never lied to me.’

A spokesman said: ‘We’re sorry that we didn’t identify the benefits due from Miss Sutton’s father’s pension policy in 2014. Once this came to light, we apologised and paid compensation which Miss Sutton accepted, and the Financial Ombudsman Service agreed we took the appropriate steps to put things right.’

Jane McCaffer, 52, says she has been reduced to tears by ‘frustrating’ phone calls with Scottish Widows’ customer helpline in an 18-month battle for money she’s owed. 

Jane, who lives near Hull, says she spent countless hours on the phone trying to track down a bond set up in 1998 with £25,000 for her and her sister Rachel.

Jane says: ‘When Mum died of cancer two years ago, I decided to make a claim because she wanted us to have the money.’ She contacted Clerical Medical, now part of Scottish Widows, in August 2024, asking for information. 

She adds: ‘It was difficult to get hold of them and when I did, I could hear babies screaming in the background.’

Over the next few months, Jane says she was given wrong information and told she had incorrectly registered the bond with HM Revenue & Customs. However, upon checking with HMRC, she was told it was all correct. 

She has received compensation from Scottish Widows on multiple occasions to make up for the poor customer service, but she says: ‘I didn’t need compensation, I just wanted the correct advice.’

Scottish Widows paid out £58,250 in February 2026, half of which Jane paid to her sister.

A spokesman said: ‘We’re sorry that Mrs McCaffer wasn’t given the right information to surrender the bond at the outset and it took much longer than it should.

‘Once the necessary evidence was received, we completed the surrender and made a payment to acknowledge the unnecessary delay. 

We’ve transformed our service in recent years through sustained investment in our systems and stronger specialist support for more complex cases.

‘That progress is reflected in our Trustpilot score and lower complaint levels. Like any large organisation, we don’t always get everything right, but we’re committed to continuing to improve.’