Monzo warning me that HSBC is a scam šŸ˜„

When I manually paid my credit card, I was told to put HSBC BNK VSA as the name on account - I had no screens (latest app on Android)

Just been through this with a card payment. Ignored it and carried on.

At least I was allowed to ignore it and carry on - it seems that other banks may not be so accommodating. An elderly neighbour trying to pay us for her shopping had a terrible time trying to get just the right payee wording for our account in order to transfer the payment. It seemed that she couldnā€™t proceed any other way.

I also got this yesterdayā€¦

Could this be done to credit card payments being slightly different?

I believe the ability to override CoP is built into the system by design so the option will have been there even if your neighbour didnā€™t notice it.

I had to help a relative yesterday, and while I donā€™t know what bank the neighbour was using in the other example, the one I was faced with had huge warnings in big letters, an override button at the bottom to continue the transaction anyway - and also a checkbox that needed to be ticked to confirm that you understand the risks.

If the same or similar, it could be the neighbour missed the override hidden at the bottom due to not scrolling down enough. Or they did scroll down and see that, but missed the checkbox higher up.

Based on that experience, it would seem banks are adding a significant amount of friction to COP, presumably so that if users override it and it does go wrong, they can say ā€œLook, we gave you plenty of warningsā€ and refuse to pay out any compensation.

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I got the same thing today when I was about to pay into my Marcus savings account. It scared me enough to test with a small amount of money before sending the full amount. Interestingly when I tried with the small amount, I didnā€™t get the warning, so thereā€™s obviously a threshold set before you receive the warning. Anyway, seems like it needs to be ironed out.

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I donā€™t think that is how it is meant to work, that is an interesting bug or maybe something Monzo have decided to do themselves

An understanding that if youā€™re sending a small amount (Ā£1?) then youā€™re probably doing your own kind of confirmation check, as it were?

A very logical decision, though I am curious, if they have set it, how small it will be.

It was Ā£1 I tried transferring as a test. Iā€™ve got to do the transfer again tomorrow, so Iā€™ll try some different values, and see what the threshold is.

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Thanks, will be interesting to see, I would guess Ā£10 maybe

With my main bank (not Monzo) I have always carried out a test Ā£1 payment to ensure I had input the SCN & account no. correctly. On subsequently paying the larger remainder amount my actions often flagged the bankā€™s Fraud Dept. to investigate what they thought could be a fraud or similar.

I also got this flag when transferring to Saxo Capital markets.
The flag also comes up again which is kind of annoying you have been successfully transferring to the same account a few times.

I got a similar warning when trying to make a payment to Three for my mobile bill. I think itā€™s because the name doesnā€™t match exactly with what it was expecting - in my case because I had put Three as the payee name instead of H3G.

As others have said, itā€™s because of the new rules around account checking. As long as youā€™re sure the details are correct then Iā€™d ignore it.

Hey everyone, this is new feature weā€™re building to protect customers from scams. Weā€™re still in the process of fine tuning the decision engine for this, our false positive rates are pretty low, but thereā€™s still some low hanging fruit for us to get. Well known account numbers and sort codes are one of them.

Weā€™ve actually rolled out two linked, but very distinct things at the same thing. One is Confirmation of Payee where youā€™ll get warnings like this:

Confirmation of Payee rules prevent us from hiding those screen for well known account numbers and sort codes. Itā€™s up to the receiving bank to provide the correct details to their customers and send us a proper response. It seems lots of banks are still in the process of updating their systems for credit card payments etc. Confirmation of Payee is still a pretty new thing.


The second system weā€™ve rolled out is a set of specific warning that we display if we believe a payment youā€™re about to make could be a scam, and look like this:

We use lots different bits of data to figure this out, and Iā€™m not going to go into the details of how that works for obvious reasons. Most people should never see these warning unless theyā€™re actually about to be scammed, but as I said above, weā€™re in the process of tuning and tweaking this system.

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Okay so I was getting this too for all my existing payees but I noticed that if you have accounts saved under a contact like I do then when you try to pay them, the recipient name is using the contacts name not the name of the account you setup.

So for example I have a Stu contact with three credit card accounts setup as payees. If I tap on [NAME] Credit Card to pay them, the recipient name is set to Stu not [NAME] Credit Card and this causes the app to flag the payment as suspicious. If I then type in [NAME] Credit Card it seems to be fine as itā€™s obviously looking for the correct [NAME] as verification.

Annoyingly though, it doesnā€™t actually remember the change so you have to type it in every time :frowning:

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@Monzo should redact the account details from this post.

A couple of posts down from the original one it explains why that isnā€™t necessary.

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@ordog Although public domain itā€™s good security practice not to quote ANY SCNs & a/c numbers. It therefore creates a precedent for all so that no one in the future quotes more sensitive information that could be seen by a scammer.

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