Is this fraud?

regularsaver1

Yeah the polic do not deal with economic fraud now - its a report through the banks instead

magneto

woolly1 wrote: »

I'll try and keep this brief ... a friend of mine who is in the early stages of divorcing her husband has just discovered that their joint account has been closed. She has not signed anything but the bank say they have documentation with 2 signatures ... clearly her ex must have forged her signature.

She was enquiring about closing the account anyway, but she had been making enquiries about some suspicious cheques (one for 10K) that he said he couldn't remember who he wrote them to when brought up at mediation! Unfortunately she didn't get the letter about this as he'd somehow managed to arrange for all his and mr & mrs mail to be held for his collection at the post office. It really looks like he's desperate to hide something to forge her signature to stop her getting access to the account. She's only discovering these things now as when they were married he kept all the statements and wouldn't let her have the password to check the account on-line. I don't know how she's going to get to the bottom of it all, but can he be prosecuted for fraud?

maybe not he but the bank can be sued because banks as a duty of care to their customer's account according to the banking law.

This is basically the ruling in LIPKIN GORMAN v KARONALE (1989). Bank should not pay any cheques not authorised by the customer (i.e. that the bank has no mandate to pay); and this basically means those with forged or unauthorized signatures.
If the bank pays such cheques it must make good the loss to the customer.

Problems:
Well, there are the one you would expect! How on earth do you know when it’s forged; good ones by definition will not be noticeable?
Further, what if someone has got the authority to draw cheques, but is simply misappropriating funds? This will be even harder to detect.
To complicate things even more, the bank has a duty of confidentiality. The existence of this may prevent them from disclosing facts they know.
The judge in LIPKIN GORMAN had the happy task of sorting this out. (The rulings he established are all quite straightforward if you remember that it’s just a case of when a bank can wrongly pay a cheque and get away with it).

for more infomation visit
http://themoneyblog.co.uk/2008/09/11/banks-duty-of-care-as-agent/