Accies set to sue bank after scam
HAMILTON ACCIES plan to sue the Royal Bank of scotland following a scam which saw the club fleeced of £1million. The Lanarkshire club claim that ‘failures’ in the RBs security system allowed fraudsters to clean out almost ‘every penny’ from the club’s bank account. Accies chiefs accept some responsibility for the security breaches, but say RBs should accept ’50 per cent’ of the blame and pay them £400,000 to offset their huge losses. Police are investigating last October’s incident when phone scammers convinced a club employee to move cash into 26 accounts to prevent theft. The first two payments — of £40,000 and £70,000 — were initially suspended by RBs’s cyber security team. But the Accies employee was convinced to ignore the warnings and continue the transactions. ‘I’m not holding RBs wholly responsible for this,’ said club
chief executive colin McGowan. ‘Hamilton Accies have to stand up and say: “Yes, we are partially to blame here. Our employee made a grave error in judgment”. ‘I’m saying Hamilton Accies are at fault here. I think we’re at fault for 50 per cent of it. And I believe the bank’s failings were in their security and duty of care. ‘You wouldn’t need to be sherlock Holmes to see something was wrong here. ‘On day two, £655,000 went out with 20 transactions. These weren’t challenged once. ‘I’ve repeatedly asked the bank if they had better security on day one than on day two. ‘They made no attempt to contact a second person — even though they’ve intervened twice — they suspected something was wrong. ‘since the club was formed in 1874, we’ve never made transactions like that.’ Accies chairman Ronnie MacDonald was also critical of RBs’s security, telling STV: ‘To write a cheque for our community programme, we need two signatories if it’s over £1,500. ‘And yet, over a period of 24 hours, a million pounds can be removed from our account. ‘I’d have liked to have seen the bank check with a director if that was the case. That would have triggered all sorts of alarms in our place.’ Accies were pushed towards the brink after the loss and remain £800,000 out of pocket. Midfielder Greg Docherty was sold to Rangers in last month’s January window for £625,000, while defender Mikey Devlin also left for Aberdeen. Insisting Hamilton are determined to avoid administration at all costs, MacDonald added: ‘Now that we are out in the open and we know exactly where we are — in other words, we’re abandoned — I’ll get the fans up to speed.’ RBs issued a robust denial that they were partly to blame and said there had been no lapses in security. They stated: ‘The bank is confident that there has been no breakdown in our security procedures in regards to this scam and that no unauthorised persons were able to gain access to any of the club’s banking facilities. ‘All payments were keyed and approved by the authorised user of the club’s account. ‘The bank contacted HAFC (Hamilton Academical Football club) to question the transactions on two separate occasions and the customer instructed the bank to continue with the payments. ‘We take the financial security of our customers extremely seriously and understand the distress that fraud and scam cases can cause. ‘We are working with HAFC and supporting Police scotland to identify the perpetrators of this scam.’