Not upheld: Fraud reimbursement (APP scams) complaint against National Westminster Bank Public Limited Company (NatWest)

Decision detail

Summary

Mr D complained that NatWest unfairly refused to refund payments he made as part of an investment scam, totalling £11,200 made between October 2021 and May 2022 to his own cryptocurrency account. Mr D argued that NatWest should have intervened with warnings about the unusual payments to a cryptocurrency provider, which would have prevented the scam. NatWest contended the payments were not unusual or out of character and that it would have provided standard cryptocurrency warnings. The ombudsman found that while NatWest should have been alert to fraud risks, the payment pattern was not sufficiently suspicious to warrant intervention, and the evidence did not clearly demonstrate Mr D's total losses given approximately £5,500 in returns received and incomplete transaction records. The complaint was not upheld.

The Ombudsman's reasoning

While NatWest should have been alert to the possibility of Authorised Push Payments scams and intervened if there were clear indications of risk, the payments in this case were not sufficiently unusual or out of character to trigger reasonable intervention. The individual payment amounts were not exceptionally large, the pattern was not consistent with typical fraud (initial test transactions followed by infrequent main payments over seven months), and it was not clear that the cryptocurrency provider would have been identifiable as such to NatWest at the time. In 2021-early 2022, cryptocurrency scams were not as prevalent as they later became. Additionally, the evidence does not clearly demonstrate the total amount of Mr D's losses, as he received approximately £5,500 in returns and cannot provide complete transaction histories from his second cryptocurrency account.

How this compares

Source

Read the original decision on the Financial Ombudsman Service website