Not upheld: failure to intervene in scam payments / insufficient fraud monitoring complaint against Capital One (Europe) plc

Decision detail

Summary

Miss L complained that Capital One failed to protect her from a romance scam in which she sent £2,000 across four payments to a person she met online who falsely claimed to be a soldier. Capital One declined to refund the authorized transactions, arguing they showed no fraud indicators. The ombudsman found that the individual £500 payments were not sufficiently unusual or suspicious to warrant intervention by the bank, and that even if Capital One had questioned the payments, Miss L would likely have proceeded as she genuinely believed she was helping someone in need. The complaint was not upheld.

The Ombudsman's reasoning

While firms should intervene in unusual and out-of-character transactions, the ombudsman found that the individual payments of £500 each were not sufficiently suspicious in isolation or cumulatively (£1,000 daily maximum) to warrant intervention. The ombudsman considered the payment values relative to other account spending, the volume of transactions banks process daily, and the unremarkable nature of the beneficiaries. Additionally, the ombudsman found that even if Capital One had intervened, Miss L would likely have proceeded with the payments as she genuinely believed she was helping a soldier and had not yet discovered the deception.

How this compares

Source

Read the original decision on the Financial Ombudsman Service website