men were jailed for two and a half years for the theft of £770,000. Lord Chief Justice Sir Brian Kerr criticised the bank's security measures during the trial. First Active In 2003–04, Ulster Bank Group purchased First Active, Ireland's oldest building society, for €887 million. In 2009, the First Active branch network and business of several hundred thousand savers and borrowers was merged with Ulster Bank, and the brand name was retired in 2010. Computer failure In June 2012, a computer system failure prevented customers from accessing accounts. Initial estimates that the problem would be sorted out within a week were wildly optimistic, with thousands of customers still unable to access their accounts into late July 2012, with ongoing issues still not resolved by mid-August 2012. This RBS / NatWest / Ulster Bank issue has proved to be one of the largest IT failures the world has ever known. Ulster Bank (the smallest part of the RBS group) was to initially set aside £28 million for compensation to customers. Tracker mortgage scandal In the Republic of Ireland from 2008, Ulster Bank Ireland dac encouraged customers on tracker mortgages to switch to the more-profitable fixed rate mortgages as interest rates on tracker mortgages, which is set to the European Central Bank borrowing rate plus 1%, reduced significantly due to the 2008 financial crisis. As part of this, mortgage customers were not told about the risks of moving to a fixed rate, and were instead encouraged with the offer of constant mortgage repayments and interest. Other customers were offered a temporary switch to a fixed rate mortgage, with the promise of being moved back to a tracker rate after a time period, which did not occur until customers complained as per a company policy introduced in 2011. In 2015, the Central Bank of Ireland opened an investigation into the lenders which sold tracker mortgages, finding KBC Bank Ireland, Permanent TSB, Bank of Ireland and AIB were also among those complicit in denying customers correct rates. On 25 March 2021, the Central Bank of Ireland fined Ulster Bank Ireland DAC €37.774 million, after discovering 5,940 customers had been directly affected by the scandal, along with 49 separate regulatory breaches. Future In March 2014, it was reported that the then RBS Group was considering merging the bank in the Republic of Ireland with some of its rivals in order to reduce its holding. RBS