Our client ‘Olivia’ was duped into transferring £1,300 by a scammer posing as a landlord renting a flat.
In May 2024, she saw the property advertised for rent on Facebook Marketplace and contacted who she was led to believe was the landlord. She was told she would need to pay a deposit of £650. After this had been received, Olivia was given a contact number in order to communicate on WhatsApp in future.
Three days after she transferred her deposit, Olivia was asked for another £650 for the first rent payment. She was also pressured into making that second payment within the hour as she was told that the solicitor, whose account she thought she was paying her money into, would be closed for three weeks from the following day and so she would have to make the transfer immediately.
After she had transferred the two payments, she was provided with the postcode for the flat. However, when she went to view the property, the occupant told her she had been tricked, that the flat wasn’t available to rent and that whoever she had been communicating with was definitely not the landlord.
Any further calls made, and messages sent, to the number she had been given went ignored from that point.
A devastated Olivia contacted her bank but they refused to compensate her for the losses, as they declined to accept responsibility for allowing her to lose her money without intervening and protecting her.
She turned to Barings Law for help and our bank fraud department examined whether she had a case for claiming compensation from her bank. We prepared Olivia’s claim and contacted the bank on her behalf, stating that they should have recognised the unusual nature of the transactions their customer was making and taken action.
The bank’s processes and procedures should have led them to exercise reasonable protection measures for Olivia.
Given the unusual payments she was transferring in such a short space of time, this bore the characteristics of an authorised push payment (APP) scam. Olivia’s highly suspicious activity, prompted by a convincing scammer, should have been identified by the bank’s suspicious activity team and given them reasonable grounds to intervene.
Had they done so, Olivia would not have been tricked into sending her money to a scammer.
After Barings Law’s intervention, Olivia’s bank reviewed their original decision not to refund their customer, and they agreed to refund her the full £1,300 plus 8% interest for the time she was without that money, resulting in a total payment of £1,321.77*.
* Amount is before deductions for fees and disbursements
