Sally says:

With the Black Friday weekend shopping frenzy in full swing and Christmas around the corner, I felt it timely to include your story as a warning to other readers.

Millions of us will be expecting packages to be delivered in the coming weeks and so could easily fall foul of the type of scam that caught you out. It was all too believable that a delivery was being held until you had paid your import duty. The moment you clicked the link you had been sent out of the blue, you were sucked into a spiral that ended with you losing more than £9,000.

This was a complex but effective fraud, where the crooks first hooked you in using a classic phishing technique – sending you a text message with the aim of getting you to click the link. Once you clicked, you were sent to a fake website designed to glean your passwords and personal information. The fraudsters then posed as your bank over the phone and tricked you into making payments, by persuading you that you needed to “protect” your money by moving it into a safe account.

The methods employed were convincing, even the so-called security measures referred to as “Bitstamp level procedures” – which were simply a ruse to trick you into transferring money to a cryptocurrency exchange.

When you finally realised it was all a terrible scam, you were naturally distraught. You alerted Monzo but in your panic felt you were getting nowhere and so contacted me for help.

I quickly contacted the bank on your behalf and was assured it was already on the case. But it could not tell me at that point whether or not you would be reimbursed.

However, a couple of days later, after it had fully investigated what had happened, I am happy to say the bank decided to give you back every penny plus the fees accrued on the overdraft you had been forced to set up. You were mightily relieved and described my involvement as a “massive comfort”.

Monzo says it does all it can to prevent customers from falling for such scams, including issuing warnings that it would never ask customers to move money out of Monzo and into a “safe” account. Nor would it phone a customer without arranging such a call via the Monzo app first.

I hope Monzo’s actions in your case prove to be an example to other banks. I come across too many cases where banks stubbornly refuse to issue refunds, even when it is clear to me that their customers were innocent victims of fraud. After all, no one chooses to be defrauded of their savings.

Banks should be the guardians of our money and protect us fully when crooks attempt to steal it – and, I might add, that includes those banks at the end of the chain that receive the cash transferred via an “authorised push payment” fraud.

In 2019 many big banks signed up to a code called the Contingency Reimbursement Model to refund victims scammed in this way. But still too many claims were denied, often unfairly. The Financial Ombudsman Service went on to uphold three out of four such rejected claims in the 2020-21 financial year.

Under plans announced earlier this month to strengthen the powers of the Payment Systems Regulator, which oversees the banking code, it is hoped refunds will eventually become compulsory, except in cases of “gross negligence” by customers.

I sincerely hope that the plans come to fruition – and quickly – and put an end to the miserable uncertainty of the reimbursement lottery that victims currently face.