Misleading MSE Advice - Go West With Mickey - Bank Transfers

BasaltRocky

Really disappointed with MSE - they are giving incorrect advice here at the MSE website at /news/2019/10/families-left-thousands-of-pounds-out-of-pocket-after-travel-fir/ (just put the moneysavingexpert.com address at the beginning of the text above - I cannot post normally, as I am a new user).

Bank transfers on or after 31 January this year (2019) are protected from a change in FCA rules.
From this date, you can complain to your bank or the payee bank, and then the FOS (Financial Ombudsman Service) that a bank transfer payment you made was fraudulent, and seek recompense if either your bank or the payee bank did not do enough to prevent that fraud.

The FOS has extremely wide-ranging powers, and this protection should cover many affected people.

The protection from 28th May this year is different voluntary protection that some banks have agreed to, and in some respects is possibly significantly inferior to the 31st January protection (which may or may not end with the bank rejecting your claim).

If you made a bank transfer, even if you claim under the 28 May CRM voluntary scheme, you may definitely wish to complain to your bank and the payee bank, and then to the FOS, that the banks did not do enough to prevent fraud.

Therefore, MSE is seriously misleading people who have made a bank transfer with their advice above.

JuicyJesus

It is difficult to see how this would fall under something the APP scheme covers, and it's yet another illustration of how introducing such a scheme is generally quite a bad idea.

The message should be "don't be an idiot and pay for things you can't physically touch from people you've never met by bank transfer", not "if you see a cheap deal you can pay by bank transfer and get it back" or in this case "if you paid by bank transfer you can claim to your bank that it's fraud".

eskbanker

BasaltRocky wrote: »

Bank transfers on or after 31 January this year (2019) are protected from a change in FCA rules.
From this date, you can complain to your bank or the payee bank, and then the FOS (Financial Ombudsman Service) that a bank transfer payment you made was fraudulent, and seek recompense if either your bank or the payee bank did not do enough to prevent that fraud.

If there's any misleading going on here, it would appear to be your representation above!

Assuming you're referring to FCA policy statement PS18/22, all this does is to permit consumers to complain to banks receiving transfers as well as those sending them, and to give them the right to escalate from there to FOS, and for FOS to be obliged to handle such complaints.

This is largely a technicality and doesn't offer any actual meaningful protection as such, unless the sender has evidence of wrongdoing by the receiving bank, so MSE are right not to refer to it IMHO, as it's the voluntary May code that actually gives some sort of protection to the consumer in the right circumstances. If the May code was weaker than the January changes then it wouldn't have needed to be introduced....

In any case, has it been conclusively established that there was fraud here, as opposed to failure to deliver? If GWWM were out and out scammers that never provided any service then a case could perhaps be made for that, but as I read it, they had been fulfilling bookings and so the situation is closer to the collapse of a trading business, not entirely dissimilar in principle to Thomas Cook's failure, albeit on a different scale.

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2019/10/families-left-thousands-of-pounds-out-of-pocket-after-travel-fir/ states that "One [family] had previously been on two holidays booked via Go West With Mickey" so at face value it doesn't seem cut and dried that this scenario is within the scope of APP fraud measures.

Perhaps a moot point anyway, as I'd have thought that the vast majority of holiday bookers would pay by card rather than bank transfer, so MSE's prominent focus on chargeback or s75 seems reasonable....