Attempted fraud using Metro Bank

A story of attempted fraud, and Metro Bank’s response.

This morning, a member of my team got an email from what looked like me asking “Are you in the office yet?” to which he responded “No, not yet. On my way. Why?”. Back came another response: “Please let me know when you’re in as I need to make an urgent payment.”

This team member is not in finance, so he checked the email address. Not me.

We decided to continue playing along. What ended up coming through was an invoice for payment of £28,505 for “due diligence and consulting services” with payment details to Metro Bank.

I called Metro bank and explained the situation. They took down the account number and said there was little they could do without evidence so asked me to forward over the invoice and email chain.

I did, including repeating the conversation I had on the phone.

A few hours pass, and I just got a response from Metro Bank: “I have been unable to locate you on our system. Please note that for this email to be validated, it must be sent from the email address that we hold on our system for you. Please call us on 0345 08 08 500 as we would need to ask a few questions regarding this so that we can look to resolving this for you.”

I give up. No wonder banks can’t get on top of fraud.

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It looks bad… so they go out of their way to keep it out of the official figures, by throwing up as many barriers as possible.

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I’d send this to their social media pages too as that will probably get a quicker response time.

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That feels like lazy customer service :see_no_evil:

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