From May 2019 consumers have benefited from significantly increased protections against authorised push payment scams.

Authorised push payment (APP) scams are when customers are tricked into authorising a payment to an account that they believe belongs to a legitimate payee – such as a solicitor, builders, financial companies or online trader. Often the customer was expecting to pay and ask for money to be transferred from one bank account directly into theirs. These scams are sophisticated and very convincing. Customers have lost tens of thousands of pounds, as often their bank would not agree to reimburse as the customer had arranged the transfer.

A new code of practice aims to make sure that customers making payments are not penalised for fraudsters’ criminal actions.

From now banks that are signed up to the voluntary code will have a new set of criteria to judge whether the customer should get the money back. Previously, banks only tended to reimburse people if there was an obvious fault in the way the payment was handled by the bank

Find out more from the 'Which' website.