New 'maximum' UK bank account rule leaves customers 'unable to sleep'

New Lloyds, Nationwide, Santander, NatWest, HSBC, TSB compensation rules have been slammed by bank account holders - with victims of fraud explaining how crime has impacted their lives and left them "unable to sleep" amid the Cost of Living crisis.

In 2023, there were 252,626 reported cases of APP scams totalling almost £341 MILLION, according to the latest official data. That is 692 cases a day, almost 29 an hour, with Nationwide the most likely to compensate customers - with a rate of 96 per cent.

One victim told the Guardian: "I couldn’t sleep. I was waking constantly thinking about it." He was scammed out of £70,000 by fraudsters who tricked him into buying a fake high-interest savings bond and added: "I felt stupid – as a former solicitor, I thought: what was I thinking? But at the same time it was sophisticated.”

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The findings come as the maximum amount that banks are required to reimburse customers who have been duped into transferring money to fraudsters is set to be drastically reduced. A second lost £240,000 when he was buying a house. “I do think about it a lot,” he said, going on to tell the newspaper this weekend: “I thank God that this did not occur with a reduced compensation level of just £85,000.”

The regulator is scaling back plans to refund UK fraud victims, cutting the maximum that banks must pay by almost 80% from the proposed £415,000. The second victim said: “The £240,000 scammed from us was not because I was not trying to make a shady get-rich-quick investment. It was for the purchase of a house to spend our retirement years in.

"To only get a third of that back would have ruled out being a homeowner, which we had been when we sold our house in Wales to be closer to my daughters and grandchildren.” Consumer group Which? has slammed the move as "outrageous", warning it could expose some people to "devastating financial and emotional harm". Rocio Concha, Which? director of policy and advocacy, accused the payments regulator of watering down vital scam protections following "months of lobbying from firms".

She warned: "Slashing the reimbursement limit risks exposing victims of the highest value scams to devastating financial and emotional harm and also significantly reduces crucial financial incentives for payments firms to put in place effective fraud security measures. This makes it more likely that scammers will continue to thrive on some payment platforms."