Not upheld: scam claim and refund request complaint against Bank of Scotland plc trading as Halifax

Decision detail

Summary

Mr M paid £280 to a cleaning company (C) for end of tenancy cleaning services across three payments. Although C completed approximately six hours of work, Mr M was dissatisfied with the quality and had to hire another cleaner to finish the job properly. Mr M later discovered that C had been dissolved on Companies House but was still advertising as a limited company online. He reported this to Halifax as a scam and requested a refund, but Halifax declined, characterizing it as a private civil dispute. The ombudsman upheld Halifax's decision, finding that because Mr M received the service he paid for, he was not deceived about the payment's purpose and therefore did not meet the legal definition of an APP scam victim under FPS rules. The complaint was not upheld.

The Ombudsman's reasoning

The ombudsman applied the FPS rules definition of APP scam, which requires that a consumer be deceived about the purpose of the payment or the identity of the recipient. Here, Mr M received the domestic cleaning service he paid for, so he was not deceived about the payment's purpose. The fact that the service quality was poor constitutes a private civil dispute over service quality, not a scam. While company C may have misrepresented its legal status, this does not transform a service quality dispute into fraud. The ombudsman noted that if C had intended to scam Mr M from the outset, it would not have spent time and resources completing six hours of cleaning work.

How this compares

Source

Read the original decision on the Financial Ombudsman Service website