I have now found out the full story of the contactless card saga. The contactless card, it seems, was taken from an old lady in a residential home by an Agency Care Worker just before Christmas. From then on, until the second week in January, the card was used 93 times by under £30 amounts, including 5 spends in convenience stores on Christmas Day, to buy drink and food, but the majority purchases were scratch cards! The card failed 31 times during this period. At no point during this spending spree, or when the card failed to pay up, did the bank (NatWest) attempt do anything! When the niece tried to get some of the money back, the attitude generally was, its not our fault, you need to prove it, perhaps the old lady lent the card to someone, etc.
I believe the cuprit has now been caught, only because the niece and her husband took the time to ring around everywhere to find out if he/she with the card, could be seen on a CCTV camera. In the end Waitrose came up trumps, the member of staff that they phoned was really helpful.
Its very easy why some people want to believe belive that our banks are crooked in some way, what with Barclays appearing to lie in their literature that you cannot have a non-contactless card when plainly you can, to trying to weadle out of any resposibility that they may be at fault themselves in some way. The banks designed these stupid things, they must known the weakeness of them before they persuded the public that they are so wonderful. Or they knowingly did it because they knew that they would be the main benificiary and rake in money by the bucketful because most people (including me for a while) would trust them simply because they are banks.