Banks told not to assume victims of scams are to blame

BANKS are brushing off thousands of customers a year by refusing to compensate them for falling victims to scams, the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) has found.

Caroline Wayman, chief ombudsman and chief executive of the FOS, said that with frauds becoming increasingly sophisticated it was “not fair to automatically call a customer grossly negligent simply because they’ve fallen for a scam”.

The FOS, which resolves disputes between consumers and financial firms, deals with more than 8,000 cases a year involving fraud and scams.

Ms Wayman said: “In cases where criminals are involved, both banks and their customers often tell us in strong terms that they haven’t done anything wrong.”

The service said it regularly heard from banks that people who had been scammed had acted with gross negligence – and therefore banks were not liable for the customer’s money.

But, the ombudsman service has told banks to be more understanding, saying there is a “very high bar” for being grossly negligent – and this was far more than just being careless.