News from our partners: Authorised Push Payment Code launched

News from our partners Authorised Push Payments (APP) Scams Steering Group, established by Payment Systems Regulator

There has been an important announcement today (Tuesday 28 May 2019) to give consumers better protection against scammers, with the launch of Authorised Push Payment Code.

Fraudsters pretend to be legitimate organisations such as a solicitor, builders, financial companies or online trader, who the individual was expecting to pay and ask for money to be transferred from one bank account directly into theirs. This is known as APP (Authorised Push Payment) Scams. These scams are sophisticated and are very convincing.

Some 84,000 bank customers lost money – sometimes tens of thousands of pounds and often their bank would not agree to reimburse the customer as the customer had arranged the transfer.

The new code aims to make sure that customers making payments are not penalised for fraudsters’ criminal actions.

How will the new code work?

People who realise they have been caught out in these scams should report the fraud to their bank immediately as normal.

From now banks that are signed up to the voluntary code will have a new set of criteria to judge whether the customer should get the money back. Previously, banks only tended to reimburse people if there was an obvious fault in the way the payment was handled by the bank. Some £354m was lost in this fraud to individuals and businesses last year, but only £83m was refunded. Now anyone who has taken reasonable care, or has any element of vulnerability, is much more likely to receive a refund of the lost money.