Not upheld: scam and fraud - refund claim complaint against Wise Payments Limited

Decision detail

Summary

Mrs B fell victim to an online job scam in February 2024 where she made multiple payments from her Wise account believing she was funding work tasks. By 19 March 2024, she attempted four payments of £980 to the same payee on the same day, a suspicious pattern Wise should have identified. Wise did intervene with scam warnings and asked Mrs B to identify the payment purpose, but she was being guided by the scammer and deliberately selected false information (claiming payments were to friends and family rather than online work). The ombudsman found that while Wise should have intervened earlier, any intervention would not have prevented the loss given Mrs B's deliberate provision of false information while under the scammer's direction.

The Ombudsman's reasoning

While firms must process authorised payments, they also have regulatory obligations to protect customers from fraud through monitoring and intervention. Wise should have identified heightened fraud risk by 19 March 2024 based on the suspicious payment pattern and provided a tailored warning. However, because Mrs B was being actively guided by the scammer and provided false information to Wise's warnings (selecting 'friends and family' instead of 'online work' and falsely claiming to have met the recipient), any further intervention by Wise would likely not have prevented the loss. The earlier payments were not obviously suspicious as they were to different individuals in varying amounts with gaps between them.

How this compares

Source

Read the original decision on the Financial Ombudsman Service website