Why can a bank refund some scam victims but not others?

A bank can refund some scam victims and not others because the rules treat a payment you authorised very differently from one you did not. If a thief steals your card, the payment is unauthorised, and there are protections for that. In authorised push payment (APP) fraud, victims are manipulated into making real-time payments to fraudsters themselves, typically through impersonation. Because the victim pressed "send", banks historically treated the payment as the customer's own.

In the UK, until 2019, victims of these frauds were typically not fully reimbursed by their banks. In September 2016 the consumer group Which? raised a super-complaint calling for better protection, and from May 2019 some victims could receive refunds under a voluntary scheme whose protections applied only to customers of signatory firms, with exclusions.

Then the rules changed. The Payment Systems Regulator's reimbursement protections started on 7 October 2024, applying to payments made on or after that date. They cover individuals, microenterprises and charities. Both the sending and receiving firms split the costs 50:50. Under the PSR's description, customers can expect reimbursement within 5 business days, up to £85,000 per claim, unless they are found to have been complicit or grossly negligent. The PSR said £459.7 million was lost to APP scams in 2023. According to UK Finance, its members reported £576.4 million of APP losses in 2025, and £354.3 million was returned to victims.

The rules apply to UK bank transfers over Faster Payments or CHAPS; other payment types have their own protections. Elsewhere the situation differs: in Canada, banks had refused to reimburse bank-investigator scams because the victim authorized the transfer.