Steps for reporting Barclays Bank Ebay & Gumtree Vehicle / Car Scams

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For future reference, after explaining the difficulties victims have faced in the past when trying to report that they have been scammed on a vehicle purchase, we have agreed with Barclays the most efficient way to report to them.

If you are unfortunate enough to have fallen victim to Online Vehicle Sales Fraud and the account money was transferred into was a BARCLAYS account, then please follow the steps below.

• Telephone the general Consumer Contact number 0845 755 5555
• Make it clear that you are a victim of an Internet Selling Fraud/Online Vehicle Sales Fraud ( important you use those keywords)
• Ask to be put through to The Fraud Operations Team
• Before putting you through they may ask you a series of questions to establish some key information, please be co-operative and give as much info as you can, always insist on being put through even if they say they will pass on the information.
• The Fraud Ops Team will ask for the Sort Code and Account Number if not already given before being put through. Please make sure you have these ready.

Their aim is to get the account closed as soon as possible, so the call may be brief and seem uninterested in any other details, please take this into account when speaking with them, their job is to close the account ASAP so they are not being rude or uncaring.

The possibility of any funds remaining in the account is very slim/next to zero as the fraudsters usually withdraw any funds within a matter of hours of it being deposited.

The next point of call is to contact your own bank to inform them of what has happened, again there is very little that can be done but reporting it is important.

Contact Action Fraud by telephoning 0300 123 2040 (some mobile providers may charge you) or online , give as much detail as possible.

Again, Action Fraud are not there to investigate, they are there to collect data.

If you think an Online Vehicle Sale is fraudulent and have not transferred any money yet, then please post up details here and we can take a look, if you have an account number for the money transfer then please give us that as soon as possible so we can report that directly to the bank. If it is a scam, even if you have not lost any money, please still report it to Action Fraud.

If you ACT QUICKLY as soon as you realise you have been scammed you may have a chance of getting your money back. If the bank doesn't take action to attempt to cancel or stop the transaction you may be able to raise a formal complaint with the bank and take it forwards through the Financial Ombudsman Service.

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consumer complains bank has failed to recall payment made to scam holiday company

One evening, Miss E was searching online for summer holidays. She found a Spanish villa that she was interested in – and filled in an enquiry form on the owner’s website. However, she then found the same villa – at a discounted rate – on a third-party holiday website. The website’s booking page said that to secure the date they wanted, customers needed to pay the rental money upfront. So Miss E logged in to her online bank account and made an international “SWIFT” transfer of €1,900 to the company.

Early the next morning Miss E received a phone call from a Spanish number. It was the owner of the villa – asking whether she was still interested in renting it. Miss E explained that she’d already made a booking through the holiday website. When the owner told her that he only accepted direct bookings, Miss E began to worry that something wasn’t right. When she looked online she found that people were reporting that the holiday website was a scam.

Miss E phoned her bank straight away to explain what had happened. She was told that an attempt to recall the SWIFT payment would be processed immediately. Three days later, the bank phoned Miss E back. They said that the request to recall the payment had been sent to the wrong department – and hadn’t been processed in time. And they hadn’t been able to contact the Spanish bank that the recipient’s account was with. This meant that the SWIFT payment couldn’t be cancelled.

Miss E was angry and upset – and made a complaint. The bank acknowledged their mistake. However, they insisted that they’d done all they could – and that their mistake hadn’t affected the chances of recovering the money. They offered Miss E £150 to compensate her for the inconvenience. But Miss E rejected the offer and brought the complaint to us.

complaint upheld

We needed to decide whether the bank had done everything it could to cancel the SWIFT payment. We asked to see their system notes so we could establish what had happened after Miss E had got in touch with them.

Miss E told us that she used the website on the Thursday evening. This was consistent with the bank’s records – which showed that the SWIFT payment process had been initiated at 9am on Friday morning. Looking at the bank’s notes, it was only an hour after this that Miss E phoned to ask them to recall the payment. However, we saw no evidence that they had made any attempt to do so – in spite of assuring Miss E that the request would be processed immediately.

We noted that the payment from Miss E’s bank account to the scam company’s bank account had been facilitated by an intermediary bank. We got in touch with the intermediary bank to ask about their own process for recalling SWIFT payments. They confirmed that if Miss E’s bank had contacted them, they could have sent a “SWIFT message” to the recipient bank the same day – telling them to return the payment or to treat it as null and void. But there was no record of Miss E’s bank trying to contact the intermediary bank. Nor had they contacted the recipient bank – as they had told Miss E they had.

We couldn’t say for certain that Miss E would have been able to recover the money she transferred to the scam company. However, given how quickly she contacted her bank, we thought it likely that she would have recovered it.

We decided that the bank’s lack of action was a major factor in the recall being unsuccessful. So we told them to refund her the full €1,900 plus 8% interest – as well as paying her the £150 compensation that they had already offered.