I would also report them to Facebook if you are able to.
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I’m afraid Natwest gave you a slightly misleading impression. In reverse order:
- Credit cards: these will have Section 75 protection for purchases over £100, so correct to say these are the most secure. This protection is enshrined in law.
- Debit cards: the next step down as you can request a Chargeback, but quite a large step down as unlike Section 75 protection, this is not enshrined in law, and may not always be successful
- Bank transfer: no protection, equivalent to handing over cash. If you’re very lucky you may be defrauded by someone stunningly inept who doesn’t move the cash out of the account, but that’s more luck than protection. It’s really difficult to reverse these (check the money pages of page newspapers eg the Guardian and you’ll find stories of people struggling to reverse fraudulent and mistaken bank transfers)
I hope that helps add some clarity, and I’m sorry this has happened to you. Once you finish reporting through Action Fraud you should get a crime number, I believe, which you should be able to give to Monzo in the in-app chat so they can add that to your report.
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Sorry to hear it’s happened, all you can do is tag the transaction in the feed as fraud and see what Monzo will do.
When making bank transfers to new people the app does bring up a warning about this type of payment along with a blog post you can click through to read.
Good luck hopefully something positive will happen
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Hi Peter ,
Monzo ( and any bank) can attempt to recover the money for you, but it’s often unsuccessful.
Possibly with your NatWest case the account was another NatWest or RBS account so they were able to do more.
Legally your recourse is like giving cash to someone, i.e. go to the police or court , but the banks can still try help.
The monzo team have dealt with this plenty of times before so hopefully they’ll have a response soon.
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Thank you that’s really interesting to know. It begs the question as to why we’re being stopped from paying cash into people’s accounts if bank transfer is no more secure.
Thank you to all the helpful and constructive replies, have now tagged the transaction as fraud (didnt know i could do that before) and I’ve been in touch with Facebook and reported it to their admin.
Thank you for being kind.
Luckily it’s extremely hard to make a conned man feel any worse lol
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Have you really been a victim if you’ve done the same thing on multiple occasions…?
It’s an unfortunate situation but you can’t seriously expect the bank to keep making up for your negligence.
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I was always told to avoid the word “but” in a sentence…
I hope you get this resolved and Monzo can get your money back for you… But… individuals need to take responsibility too. That isn’t victim blaming. You said you’ve already done the same thing before. That suggests you are wilfully negligent and if Monzo cannot recover the money for you I would like to think they won’t just give it to you as a goodwill gesture.
When you make a payment to a new payee you get the following message.
You could look at your home or motor insurance if you have them as you may have some cover for this sort of thing, although as you may be deemed negligent you might not be covered.
In an ideal world you should be able to buy things freely without being subject to fraud however we don’t live in an ideal world. Fraud costs billions to the global economy and we all have a responsibility to try and reduce it.
I have tried not to come across as being unhelpful. Believe me when I say I’m trying to give advice so you don’t fall foul again.
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Bank transfer are plenty secure. That they can’t be reversed doesn’t mean they’re less secure. If they could be reversed we’d probably see levels of fraud go up
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I totally agree with your comments, I left this forum for over 18mths for that very same reason.
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If this forum is an example of poor attitude with rude comments, then I’d like to suggest you never look at any other forum on the internet. This place is incredibly tame in comparison.
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Compared to a random forum on the internet yes, but take a look at other organisations, Freetrade, Starling, even half of reddit is nicer than the attitude here.
Yes, got to say I’ve never seen a cross word on the Starling forum… 
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Yh that Starling forum is cracking, I love it there
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Bank transfers are basically the same as giving cash to person in the pub. Unfortunately there is very little protection if you get scammed, especially with this type of scam, which we call a “Purchase Scam”.
For bank transfers there is not such thing as a charge back, and it isn’t normally possible for us to get money back. We can email the other bank and ask nicely, but if the money been taken out at an ATM or moved to a different account, then I’m afraid you’re out of luck.
Monzo does follow the spirit of the Contingent Reimbursement Model scheme (CRM), which does reimburse people from the banks pocket for certain bank transfer scams. However this scam almost certainly doesn’t qualify, as you knew who you were sending the money too, making this a civil dispute.
It sounds like you’ve already reported this in chat which is the right thing to do. We’ll log the scam, and reach out to the other bank. However please don’t expect to get your money back, it’s almost certainly gone 
.
I appreciate this doesn’t help you now, but in the future I would really recommend using a services like PayPal, or service that lets you use your card. If you get scammed using your card it’s much easier for us to help you out, because we can raise chargebacks against the merchant to get the money back.
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This is a money laundering control. With cash the bank has no idea where the money came from. With a bank transfer there’s a digital paper trail which makes it easier for us create anti-money laundering rules.
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Bank transfers are like cash in the sense that they can’t be reversed (besides very exceptional circumstances and the cooperation of the receiving bank and account holder) but they still carry a paper trail which law enforcement should be able to investigate. Whether they can be bothered to do so is another matter but it wouldn’t hurt to get in touch with the police (on the non-emergency number) anyway.
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Hopefully, your story will serve as a warning to never send money by bank transfer to any person or organisation you don’t have reason to trust.
I really hope you get your money back, but as you will have read in other posts, it’s unlikely.
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If you stick to /r/fuffykittens maybe… just… maybe! but I doubt they’ll be immune too.
I’d say in the comments section of every post on Reddit there are inappropriate ones. Nevermind the names of some subreddits 
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Reddit is awful. As you say, it can appear nicer depending which subreddits you look at. But it can also appear nicer because users can downvote posts (and hide them), so that tucks away some of the ruder stuff. But users can also downvote post they simply disagree with regardless of facts, so good replies can get hidden if the hivemind don’t want to accept the answer!
The best thing I can say about Reddit is that at least it’s not 4chan.
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