Not upheld: authorized push payment (APP) fraud - failure to prevent complaint against Barclays Bank UK PLC

Decision detail

Summary

Mr U fell victim to a sophisticated employment scam and transferred over £17,000 from his Barclays account to an international money remittance service. Barclays intervened on several occasions but took only light-touch approaches focused on authorization rather than fraud prevention. Although the ombudsman found Barclays could have done more to protect Mr U, it concluded that causation was not established because Mr U was being actively coached by fraudsters to provide misleading explanations to the bank (claiming transfers were to family members), and he had been persuaded by their narrative. The ombudsman found it improbable that more robust intervention would have prevented the loss and did not uphold the complaint, considering Barclays' offer of 50% refund from the third payment onwards to be fair and reasonable.

The Ombudsman's reasoning

While Barclays failed to implement sufficiently robust protections and its interventions were inadequate, the ombudsman found that causation was not established. The critical factor was that Mr U was being actively coached by fraudsters to provide credible but misleading explanations to the bank (claiming transfers were to family members). The ombudsman concluded that more probing questioning would likely not have uncovered the true nature of the payments because Mr U had been persuaded by the fraudsters' narrative and was following their specific instructions on what to tell the bank.

How this compares

Source

Read the original decision on the Financial Ombudsman Service website