In an exclusive piece for the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), our Head of Investigations, Tony McClements, welcomes news that the UK’s Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) has made it mandatory for victims of authorised push payment (APP) fraud to be reimbursed within five days.

APP fraud accounted for £485.2 million in losses in the UK in 2022 and this is expected to nearly triple by 2026. The APP system is prone to abuse: it involves the fraudster tricking their victims into willingly making large bank transfers to the fraudster.

️Says Tony:

[In the past] when victims of fraud tried to report their losses to a bank, they were often faced with hurdles designed to prevent them recovering their lost money. Eventually, these obstacles became almost insurmountable …

… I anticipate that the issue of ‘negligence’ will form the basis for future skirmishes between the banks and their customers. The question of whether a customer has acted negligently is open to conjecture, and therefore debate.

Read more on the ACFE Insights blog

Tony McClements is Head of Investigations at Martin Kenney & Co (MKS), and a guest lecturer in Fraud and Financial Investigation at the School of Justice at the University of Central Lancashire. He is a 33-year veteran police detective investigating serious & organised crime, specialising in the investigation of fraud since 1998.