Refund from Bank due to scam

stuartaman

My son was a victim of the recent Royal Mail scam and transferred over £3000 to an 'unknown' account at Barclays.  He realised his mistake within the hour and contacted his bank..Lloyd's in this instance.  After weeks of chasing, nothing really came of it.  I understand fully that he should have read the risk warnings etc etc and is largely to blame, however, I don't understand why Barclays cannot get the money back from the account it was transferred to as addresses and passport/driving license details would have been required by them in order to set up the account (KYC and all that).  Am I barking up the wrong tree?  Any thoughts most appreciated.

user1977

stuartaman said:
I don't understand why Barclays cannot get the money back from the account it was transferred to 

Well, they can't do so if the account doesn't have any money in it, for a start. I expect it's whisked away immediately to somewhere else.

Diamandis

Have they given a reason why they are not refunding? The next step would be to take his complaint to the financial ombudsman. 

Pollycat

Diamandis said:

Have they given a reason why they are not refunding? The next step would be to take his complaint to the financial ombudsman. 

Yes, the exact wording of Lloyds response would be helpful rather than 'nothing really came of it'.

Sandtree

stuartaman said:

My son was a victim of the recent Royal Mail scam and transferred over £3000 to an 'unknown' account at Barclays.  He realised his mistake within the hour and contacted his bank..Lloyd's in this instance.  After weeks of chasing, nothing really came of it.  I understand fully that he should have read the risk warnings etc etc and is largely to blame, however, I don't understand why Barclays cannot get the money back from the account it was transferred to as addresses and passport/driving license details would have been required by them in order to set up the account (KYC and all that).  Am I barking up the wrong tree?  Any thoughts most appreciated.

How do you think Barclays have any more power to reach into another bank and take money from one of their customers? Certain transaction types have consumer protections but they are B2C transactions and are pull (the business requests the money from the customer's account).

In all probability you are asking Barclays to pay the money out of their own pocket. And "within the hour" means the money was long gone from Lloyds by the time he called his bank.

The complaints that tend to be successful in this space are where the transaction is so atypical for the account that the Financial Ombudsman believe that it should have triggered further checks. The ones I've seen are more like transferring £30,000 than £3,000 but it all comes down to how the account is normally run.

eddddy

stuartaman said:

...however, I don't understand why Barclays cannot get the money back from the account it was transferred to as addresses and passport/driving license details would have been required by them in order to set up the account (KYC and all that). 

Just on that very specific point...

Scammers often use "mule's" bank accounts to launder the money - i.e. naive students or young people, who don't realise that they're committing a crime.


For example, the scammer would say something like this to the potential 'mule'....

"Somebody in the UK wants to pay me £3000, but I don't have a UK bank account. So can they pay the £3000 into your account, then you withdraw £2700 and send it to me by Western Union?  You can keep the remaining £300 as a 'thank you'".


(Another variant, is that the mule has a bank account with nothing in it, and they are offered, say, £100 by somebody who hangs around their school gate to let them 'borrow' their account for a week or two - so they hand over the online login details. And the scammer then runs the account until it gets closed down.)


Obviously, the 'mule' gets into serious trouble and is liable for the £3000 - but it they don't have £3000, they can't repay it.




Edit to add...

But most banks are now introducing 'Confirmation of Payee' - which means the payee's name is checked - which should help to reduce this type of fraud.