UK Mandates Banks to Reimburse Bank Transfer Fraud Victims

The UK has implemented regulations requiring banks to reimburse fraud victims and proposed new rules to allow more time for investigating suspicious payments.

The Payments Systems Regulator has introduced new protections for Authorized Push Payment (APP) scams, where individuals are deceived into bank transferring money to fraudsters.

The measures ensure that all payments made through the Faster Payments system, used for mobile and online banking, or CHAPS system, often used for consumer payments like house purchases, will be protected.

Banks are required to refund victims of APP fraud up to £85,000 as standard, though they can choose to reimburse more. The original mandatory reimbursement limit was expected to be £415,000, but banks successfully lobbied for a lower limit.

The regulator said that the decision to lower the maximum limit was “carefully balanced” and assured that more than 99% of APP claims by volume will still be covered.

Firms can also choose to apply an optional excess of up to £100, however this cannot be applied to vulnerable customers.

David Geale, managing director of the Payment Systems Regulator, said:  “Our new requirements will see all payment firms involved facing strong incentives to introduce more robust ways of identifying and preventing these scams from happening in the first place.”

The UK Treasury has also proposed new rules that would allow banks to delay payments by 72 hours if there are reasonable grounds to suspect a payment is fraudulent.

The measures are designed to provide banks with more time to investigate payments, as they currently must either process or refuse a payment by the end of the next business day.

The UK has intensified its efforts to combat fraud. Meta has partnered with nationwide banks in a data-sharing initiative which allows banks to share intelligence with Meta to help to platform identify scammers and protect users.