My father-in-law had £5,523 stolen however HSBC says it was spending spree
- Eighty-five year old has dementia and his recollection of events is unclear
- But spending happened two hours away and was nothing like his usual activity
- Consumer champion Helen Crane investigates in 100th column
My father-in-law is 85. He has just had heart surgery, suffers from mobility issues and is in the early stages of dementia. He also recently lost his wife of more than 40 years.
He still has some independence, but this is limited to a weekly five-minute drive to do a food shop and buy a lottery ticket, and the occasional visit to a nearby social club.
In July 2023, he noticed that transactions had been made from his bank account with HSBC, totalling £5,523.
This is his sole bank account and only held around £6,000. Needless to say, this spending was completely out of character.
![Card sharks: This reader says her father-in-law had money stolen from his bank account after using a cash machine - and believes his card may have been cloned (stock image)](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/05/29/09/85425477-13467535-Card_sharks_This_reader_says_her_father_in_law_had_money_stolen_-a-1_1716970223743.jpg)
Card sharks: This reader says her father-in-law had money stolen from his bank account after using a cash machine – and believes his card may have been cloned (stock image)
He does not have internet banking, so didn’t notice until a few days later at which point he reported it to HSBC. He didn’t tell us what was happening for several weeks.
Originally HSBC did put the money back into his account pending an investigation. However, it later said that as it was his card that had been used and his Pin, the money would not be reimbursed.
The confusing thing is that my father-in-law still has his debit card in his possession.
We may never know what really happened, but our theory is it was cloned or skimmed, perhaps at a cash machine.
We also can’t rule out someone persuading him to give his details over the phone, or somehow taking his card and returning it to him.
Due to the nature of the transactions we are certain he didn’t make them himself.
The money was spent around West Bromwich and Birmingham, more than 80 miles and almost two hours’ drive from his home. Almost £4,000 was spent in a jewellery shop, and the rest was cash taken out from ATMs or spent at service stations in the early hours of the morning.
I reported this to the Ombudsman and it suggested HSBC offer him £250 in compensation which we declined. Can you help? L.E, Lincolnshire
Helen Crane, This is Money’s consumer champion, replies: This is my 100th Crane on the Case, and I think your father in law’s story illustrates what the column is all about – fighting for justice for those who have been badly let down by institutions that should know better.
The loss of this money, everything he had, has had a terrible effect on him. You told me he no longer goes to his social club, and refused to come to your house for Christmas as he was so down about the situation.
Due to his condition we may never know exactly how his details were stolen, but it seems obvious to me that he was the victim of an unscrupulous criminal.
His card could have been duplicated by a tampered-with cash machine, where he was watched while he entered his Pin. Or, he could have been persuaded to give over the information by someone on the phone or at his door.
He has mentioned a call he got from the HSBC ‘fraud squad’ just prior to the incident, which sounds as if it may have been a scam attempt as HSBC have confirmed that no genuine call took place.
But again, his memory of exactly when this happened and what, if any, information he gave is hazy.
It is also possible – though in my opinion unlikely – that someone was able to take your father-in-law’s physical card, spend on it and then return it to him without him noticing.
Yet HSBC was happy to conclude that an 85-year-old man who struggles to get much further than his local high street drove for an hour down the motorway to an unfamiliar city, in the middle of the night, in order to fill up at various petrol stations, take out cash at multiple locations and then blow £4,000 on expensive jewellery.
At best that is a total failure of common sense, and at worst it is exploiting a customers’ vulnerabilities in order to avoid paying out a few thousand pounds.
What’s worse, the Ombudsman, supposed to be a customers’ last recourse when their bank does not listen to them, agreed.
It is true that your father-in-law may not have been able to properly explain what happened in that first panicked call to HSBC, and may have got some details wrong.
But I would argue it should have been clear to the person on the other end of the phone – who, you later discovered, he had to wait for 45 minutes to get through to – that he was confused, vulnerable and needed extra support.
HSBC has form here, too. One of the saddest stories I have covered for this column was that of a couple similar in age to your father-in-law, who led an equally frugal lifestyle.
![Unlikely purchase: The card was used to buy almost £4,000 worth of jewellery from a shop in Birmingham, which was a complete anomaly in the father-in-law's spending](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/05/28/14/85422715-13467535-image-a-1_1716902517826.jpg)
Unlikely purchase: The card was used to buy almost £4,000 worth of jewellery from a shop in Birmingham, which was a complete anomaly in the father-in-law’s spending
Their only bank account was closed with their £35,000 life savings inside, leaving them unable to access their pensions and surviving on loans from family and leftover food from the freezer.
Having never travelled abroad or driven a car, they didn’t have the right identification to open a new account.
Their vulnerabilities led them to fail ‘safeguarding’ checks, designed to weed out customers committing fraud, so HSBC wasn’t able to give a reason for the closure or reverse its decision.
It was only after my intervention that the money was returned, and a new basic bank account set up.
You told me that you thought unusual transactions like those that happened on your father’s account would be blocked, because they were so different to his usual pattern of spending.
It is true that banks do sometimes temporarily freeze accounts when unusual spending takes place.
They are secretive about what triggers these warnings because they don’t want fraudsters to be able to cheat the system, but spending thousands in a jewellery shop in an unusual location would seem to me to be a good candidate.
And yet not only HSBC, but also the Ombudsman, insisted that it was either your father-in-law, with his own card, entering his own details – or that he had willingly handed someone his card and his details.
Banks usually consider that as someone being too careless and won’t pay them back the money lost.
However, the Ombudsman’s initial investigation relied on information your father in law had told HSBC about things like what he had been doing on specific dates, whether his card was in his possession on those dates and whether he had given anyone his card information, which due to his poor memory cannot be relied upon as accurate.
It also said in its report that ‘As far as HSBC’s records show, [his] genuine card and Pin number were in use. [The] card had not been reported as lost or stolen at that time – it wasn’t done so until a week later.’
The reason for the late reporting was that, as he doesn’t use online banking, your father in law wasn’t aware that the fraudulent transactions had happened until he received a paper statement.
It is also difficult to prove that the card used was ‘genuine’ and not a sophisticated copy.
Once credit card details have been obtained, they can be copied on to a blank card.
Often, banks only realise this because two transactions have taken place in locations that are too far apart for both cards to be genuine – for example, the real card being used London and then the copy in Manchester an hour later.
That didn’t happen in your father-in-law’s case, as he usually took out money to spend in cash and therefore often didn’t use his card for several days.
![The Financial Ombudsman Service, London headquarters pictured, said in an initial report that the card used appeared to be genuine and HSBC couldn't be made to reimburse the money](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/05/28/14/85422675-13467535-image-a-2_1716902706527.jpg)
The Financial Ombudsman Service, London headquarters pictured, said in an initial report that the card used appeared to be genuine and HSBC couldn’t be made to reimburse the money
The Ombudsman did suggest that HSBC paid your father £250 in compensation, because on two occasions he visited a bank branch to try and sort this out and faced a lengthy wait. However, you declined this offer and asked for the case to go to a final decision.
At the same time, you got in touch with me. It can be difficult for me to get a bank to turn its decision around once the Ombudsman has come down on its side, even in an initial verdict – but I thought it was clear something had gone wrong so I decided to get in touch with HSBC.
It reviewed the matter again, saying that it had not been aware of your father in law’s vulnerabilities at the time of the investigation.
It also accepted that the card may not have been in his possession at the time.
In light of new information, it had made the decision to refund your father in law for the entire £5,523 he lost. The Ombudsman also changed its mind and backed up this new decision, after HSBC shared the new information with it.
On top of that, HSBC said it would pay him 8 per cent interest on the money, as well as £400 as a gesture of goodwill. That should take the amount to just under £850.
An HSBC UK spokesman said: ‘Fraudsters are devious criminals who use a range of techniques to steal money from people without any concern for the mental or financial wellbeing of their victims.
‘We are very sorry to hear that [this customer] has been the victim of fraud and we empathise with his situation. We have reviewed this case, and based on new information, have decided that a full refund is appropriate, given our new understanding of the circumstances of the case.’
HSBC also said it advised customers to make it aware if a customer was vulnerable.
I would suggest that you and husband speak to your father in law about whether he would be willing to grant you power of attorney.
This would mean you could jointly manage his bank account and might help you to be alerted more quickly if something like this happened again.
I hope that your father-in-law can move on from this experience and that this year, Christmas at your place is back on.
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