You are in an appalling position, which appears to be through no fault of your own.
Although you have been scammed, you weren’t scammed by Monzo. Nevertheless I would urge you to keep complaining until you reach the Banking Ombudsman stage, to make sure that nothing can be done. It is possible, but unlikely, that Monzo may have been partly to blame.
It sounds like a really horrible position to be in I’m sorry you got caught in the scam 
The scheme itself however is voluntary and doesn’t cause any legal changes to how you technically ‘authorised’ the push payment.
Your best bet is to go down formal complaints procedure with Monzo, await their final response and as @Anarchist says, invoke your FOS rights at that stage - they have the power to overturn decisions and order the banks to make compensation payments/ refunds etc - this however is by no means a definitive - they may agree Monzo have done nothing wrong in refusing to refund you.
I do hope that you get somewhere though.
Thanks for sharing the full story. It’s a valuable lesson, for those who weren’t aware, that these scams can be very believable.
Unfortunately this is common where they will display the number of a legitimate organisation. It’s also why there’s this warning if you pay someone new
You will have given them loads of details on the phone, make sure you keep checking your credit report in case they try and obtain credit elsewhere using those details (credit cards etc)
I agree, this New Payee warning pop up everytime we add add payee.
but as a victim, I was not aware that I am talking to criminals.
Two days ago, my wife called British Airways to correct a misspelling error in our daughters e-ticket. After a very frustrating conversation with the Call Centre, she provided card details to pay the name changing on the ticket. So in less than 10 minutes, more than £2350 were transferred from our account to a bank account in India. Soon we learned that the British Airways contact link she clicked on Google was actually a scam version of British Airways website, with a fake phone number that put her on the line with a professional scammer. Now Monzo is saying that they cannot count this as a fraudulent behaviour (!!!) since we provided the card details! Monzo is lying to get off the hook – how come you cannot consider that your client was targeted by professional scammers and, therefore, she was involved in a fraud?! It’s really sad that a “modern and digital” bank behaves like this. Shame!
You can put in a complaint and if that is rejected go to the ombudsman
If it was a card payment why don’t you ask to do a chargeback?
There’s no reason why it shouldn’t qualify for a chargeback.
She wasn’t, though. She relied on Google to find something, and Google provided her with the scammers dodgy number. She sought out the scammers, in effect.
In hindsight it would have been better to go to the BA website to get the right number (or to the original email with the e-ticket which may have had the legitimate contact info), but … hindsight is 20/20. A mistake I’m sure not to be repeated.
As has been stated, you can submit a complaint, but I personally don’t feel like Monzo is behaving in a manner that any other “regular high street bank” would in this circumstance. If anyone is to blame it’s Google for allowing this kind of thing to happen, but you’ll never be able to get them to change anything, as they’re teflon.
What did they ACTUALLY say?
Not too sure whether this is one of those fabricated stories or not but for anybody who comes across this post, make sure you grab the contact number from the retailer’s official website! British Airways’ being https://www.britishairways.com/en-gb/information/help-and-contacts/contact-us.
If the webpage/number doesn’t look right, it usually ain’t.
To add, when searching via Google (because you may not know where the retailer’s official website is), always skip the ‘Ad’ results and the top and look for the ‘real’ search results to start with. This should help reduce the risk of being tricked into a fake scam site.
Alternatively, use a non-Google search engine such as Duckduckgo.
Hi Ryan. Welcome to the community! Good advice
Cheers! Nearly made the same mistake myself when phoning up my ‘bank’ but clocked in after I heard the classic Indian accent and a million people in the background!
For me that’s called ringing HSBC! The scammers probably have better quality VoIP
Yesterday they sent a bunch of messages saying they were unable to classify it as fraud, etc. Now we got this message during the morning:
“My name is Anna and I work on the complaints team at Monzo. I’m sorry you’ve had cause to complain but I’d like you to know that I am treating this as a formal complaint. I’ve attached a link to our complaint procedure for your reference here.
You should know that we’re allowed up to 15 business days to investigate a complaint and produce, what is referred to as, our final response. In line with this, our final response to your complaint is due by the close of business on 27th November.
However, as this situation has already caused you much inconvenience I’d like to resolve it much sooner. I understand you’ve raised this complaint because you’re unhappy that we’re unable to treat several transactions to Sarbatdabhalac that you’ve brought to our attention, as fraudulent.
Before I continue, please allow me to express my heartfelt apology for the unfortunate circumstances of this complaint. I can imagine this situation has been very frustrating and I’m sorry if it’s caused you to doubt the integrity of our service.
Having investigated your complaint in depth, I’m afraid I’ve been unable to overturn our decision not to treat these disputed transactions as fraudulent. This is because, under current regulations, banks have to refund fraudulent transactions unless a customer hasn’t taken reasonable measures to keep their account safe. Although the transactions are of a fraudulent nature, as you had given your card details over the phone to the fraudsters and verified the transactions through the app, we believe you placed your account at risk and haven’t taken reasonable measures to keep your details safe. Unfortunately, this means you aren’t covered by fraud-protection regulations, and we’re not able to refund these transactions for you.
However, please rest assured that we’re still able to dispute these transactions for you and I can see that we have already raised these for you. We’ll get in touch with the merchant through Mastercard by raising what’s called a ‘chargeback’. Just to let you know, once we’ve submitted this to Mastercard, it can take up to 8 weeks to process. The merchant may reject your dispute, in which case we might get in touch again to discuss the next steps or get more evidence to continue your dispute. Generally, most disputes are resolved within 3 months.
Once again, I’d like to offer my heartfelt apologies about this situation. If you have any concerns about the reported transactions and would like independent help, we suggest that you contact Action Fraud. You can call them on 0300 123 2040 (textphone 0300 123 2050) Monday to Friday from 9am to 6pm or find them online here.
I do appreciate that this may not be the response you were looking for but if you could let me know if you accept and understand the above, I will go ahead and close your complaint on our system.
Kind regards”
You out of your mind? She is a fraud victim. It’s very easy to sit there and say things about other people but the matter of fact is that she was scam. Wanna know the definition of that? The Cambridge dictionary helps a bit: “an illegal plan for making money, especially one that involves tricking people.”. Hope something similar never happens to you and then you’ll see the beautiful Monzo-way to take care of its customers.
Right. But I called yesterday to the real British Airways and the person on the phone had an indian accent and you could hear a lot of noise in the background, so…
There were several transactions? Over what time frame?
So these transactions were all verified in app?
So these were card transactions and needed approving in-app. Several of them? Why would British Airways charge several transactions under a different company name (which was displayed in the app when you approved them)? You (or your wife) decided to bypass the security measures of approving in-app and not checking the merchant name. I appreciate hindsight is 20/20 but you bypassed anti-fraud measures sadly.
