[user104658]

Most I've ever "lost" to anything in one ho was £300 to the landlord I had the final year of Uni. He flat out invented a load of damages and cleaning costs when we left the house immaculate... Was a shared house between 4 - so £1200 in total the bastard kept.

Normally something like a house deposit these days I'd just consider "spent money" - don't expect anything back, anything you do get is a nice bonus. But at the point of leaving Uni, I was moving to a new town (a new country really, we moved down to England), I had no job, and we had a baby on the way... So I was ****ing furious about that £300.

I was a little salty when they brought in mandatory deposit protection schemes a few years later as well, as we had no protection at all at that time, the only way to fight back against a landlord scamming deposits was small claims court.