Not upheld: chargeback handling and service failure in dispute logging complaint against Barclays Bank UK PLC

Decision detail

Summary

Mrs S complained about how Barclays handled refund claims for gambling transactions made between December 2023 and June 2024. She contacted Barclays in May and June 2025 to raise chargeback claims after being unable to withdraw funds from the gambling provider. Barclays incorrectly logged these as fraudulent transactions rather than chargebacks and declined to progress them as out of time. While the ombudsman accepted that Barclays' mislogging was a service failing causing inconvenience, it did not cause Mrs S to lose a realistic opportunity to recover money, as the claims were genuinely out of time under VISA's 120-day chargeback rule. The ombudsman found the £200 compensation already offered by Barclays to be fair and did not uphold the complaint.

The Ombudsman's reasoning

The ombudsman found that while Barclays made a service error by incorrectly logging the dispute as fraud, this error did not cause Mrs S to lose a realistic opportunity to recover money through chargeback. The key issue was whether the chargeback claims had reasonable prospects of success within the applicable card scheme time limits. The ombudsman determined that the 120-day time limit under reason code 13.5 had expired before Mrs S contacted Barclays in May and June 2025, as the gambling services were received at the time of transaction. The 540-day provision was interpreted as a long-stop date rather than a separate filing period. Additionally, the ombudsman found insufficient evidence that the transactions were misrepresented or unauthorised, and that alternative chargeback codes would have had even shorter time limits. Therefore, Barclays could not have raised a valid chargeback regardless of the initial logging error.

How this compares

Source

Read the original decision on the Financial Ombudsman Service website