Electronic Funds Transfer: Fraud

(asked on 27th June 2022) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether officials in her Department have provided guidance to the National Police Chiefs Council on reducing authorised push payment fraud.


Answered by
Damian Hinds Portrait
Damian Hinds
Minister of State (Education)
This question was answered on 6th July 2022

Tackling fraud requires a unified and co-ordinated response from government, law enforcement and the private sector. The Government is working with industry, including the banking and tech sectors to ensure that victims are protected from these crimes in the first place and are not left out of pocket due to Authorised Push Payment (APP) frauds.

Since 2016, the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) and the payments industry have worked together to both prevent payments fraud, and to develop better mechanisms for reimbursing victims of APP fraud. This has included introducing the voluntary Contingent Reimbursement Model (CRM) Code in 2019. Under the Code, signatory payment service providers voluntarily reimburse APP victims. The government recognised and welcomed these developments. However, reimbursement to victims of APP scams remains inconsistent. In the Queens Speech, government announced its intention to enable PSR regulatory action by amending Regulation 90 of the Payment Services Regulations, to clarify that the PSR may use its existing regulatory powers to require mandatory reimbursement in cases of APP scams in designated payment systems.

Data on the number of offences by location is not currently recorded by fraud type. However, UK Finance publish figures on the number of incidents of APP fraud for the UK each year. In 2020 UK Finance recorded 149,946 incidents of APP fraud (up 22% on 2019). Currently data is not held for the number of victims this relates to, and there may be victims who are targeted more than once. Additionally, please note UK Finance figures are for the UK and include personal and non-personal account reports.

The Home Office has not provided guidance to the National Police Chiefs Council on reducing authorised push payment fraud. Reducing this kind of fraud is a complex issue, which involves a number of different sectors to work together. That is why, the Home Office relaunched the Joint Fraud Taskforce in Oct 2021. The Joint Fraud Taskforce is a partnership between the private sector, Government and law enforcement to tackle fraud collectively and to focus on issues that have been considered too difficult for a single organisation to manage alone and to drive action to design out Fraud.

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