The Financial Ombudsman receives more and more requests to intervene in matters of unauthorized transactions. He is afraid that if the banks do not change their approach to dealing with complaints in this respect, only in 2020 the number of intervention requests will reach 1000.
For now, according to data published by the Financial Ombudsman’s office, customers complained to this institution in 2019 up to 541 times about unauthorized transactions. This is more than twice as much as in the whole of 2018. In the first quarter of 2020, there were 193 complaints in this respect, while a year earlier – 101.
,, The Covid-19 pandemic caused internet cheaters to become active. We all see that in recent weeks, banks have been warning against new attempts to extort money from bank accounts or cards. The problem is that at the same time, some of them ignore the rules regarding actions when the customer reports the fact of an unauthorized transaction. As a result, the number of complaints to us is constantly increasing
– says dr hab. Mariusz Golecki, Financial Ombudsman. And he adds: – If subsequent banks do not start changing their approach to dealing with complaints in this regard, we can expect that at the end of the year we will have about 1,000 such complaints.
Financial Ombudsman: banks do not return money on time
The Financial Ombudsman argues that some banks do not comply with EU and Polish regulations that assume that money from an unauthorized transaction should be returned to the client’s account “no later than by the end of the business day following the date on which the unauthorized transaction occurred or after receiving the notification from customer. ”
There is only one exception to this rule. The bank need not return funds within this period only if there is “reasonable and duly documented suspicion of a fraud attempt by the customer”. In such a case, the bank should inform law enforcement authorities about such suspicion.
,, In practice, this means that the bank is obliged to immediately give the client money immediately, and then – if he has reason to believe that the client should be responsible in whole or in part for the unauthorized transaction – claim this amount from the client, e.g. in court
– explains the office of the Financial Ombudsman.
Over 100,000 fraudulent card transactions
In recent days, new data of the National Bank of Poland regarding payment card fraud has appeared. It shows that in the second half of 2019 there were 111.9 thous. “Frauds”. As noted by the cashless.pl portal, for the first time in history the number of frauds has exceeded 100,000 in six months. The most fraud was related to online payments without a plastic card. The total value of fraudulent transactions in the second half of last year amounted to approximately PLN 26.9 million.
Despite the record number of card fraud, the NBP emphasizes that the scale of fraud is small – at 0.003 percent. numbers and 0.006 percent values of all card transactions. Most frauds are carried out abroad.
