WHEN Guy and Millie Parker fell victim to debit card fraud they expected to receive a sympathetic response from their bank and a prompt refund of their losses.

“We had been customers of NatWest for about 20 years and we expected the bank to believe us. We did not expect to have to fight to prove our innocence,” Mr Parker says.

But NatWest flatly refused to refund the money and accused the couple of unwittingly disclosing their personal identification number (PIN) to a thief, enabling him or her to use their debit cards without their knowledge.

The Parkers are not alone. Barry Stamp, joint managing director of Checkmyfile.com, a credit information business, says that banks often presume that victims of card fraud have been negligent or dishonest.

Mr Stamp says: “Victims are often treated as if they have spent the money themselves. We have seen hundreds of cases where customers have suffered stress when reporting card fraud to their bank or credit card company.”

The Parkers, who are both 35 and live in Muswell Hill, North London, with Freddy, their one-year-old son, discovered the fraud last May when Mrs Parker’s card was declined. She says: “When I queried this with a member of staff at the branch, I was told that between £240 and £250 had been withdrawn daily from our joint bank account for the past 11 days.”

The pattern of withdrawals had all the hallmarks of card-cloning fraud, in which a fraudster obtains the details of a card and produces a cloned copy that can be used fraudulently. Most of the fraudulent use took place in Penge, South London, around midnight. NatWest’s anti-fraud systems did not flag up these transactions.

Mrs Parker called her husband, who confirmed that his card was in his wallet. Although they immediately cancelled their account and tore up their cards, the fraudster was able to make two more withdrawals from a Moneybox cash dispenser the next day.

In total, £2,687.50 had been stolen and the couple reported the crime to the police. But the couple were shocked by NatWest’s reaction. “NatWest refused to refund the money and told us that it is impossible for people to clone chip-and-PIN cards and that we must have disclosed our PIN to the fraudster,” Mrs Parker says.

NatWest noted that three of the withdrawals had taken place at a NatWest branch in Muswell Hill. The bank said that it was very unusual for card fraud to take place so near to a victim’s home. It also claimed that its systems prove that the transactions were made using the couple’s actual card and not a cloned copy.

The couple were forced into a tortuous exchange of letters with the bank. They systematically detailed their movements when the fraudulent transactions were made, which included a three-day holiday in France.

After refusing to accept a “full and final settlement” of £350, the Parkers wrote to Sir Fred Goodwin, chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, the banking group that owns NatWest, threatening to take their compensation claim to the Financial Ombudsman Service. This prompted NatWest to offer a full refund “in the spirit of conciliation”, along with £500 compensation. But the bank dogmatically refused to believe that the card had been cloned.

However, after the intervention of Times Money, NatWest admitted that a card cloning scam had taken place. A NatWest spokesman says: “After further investigation, and contrary to what has been said previously, the transactions were not made using chip-and-PIN technology. While the customer’s card was a chip-and-PIN card, it still contains a magnetic strip. This strip appears to have been cloned and the PIN read.”

NatWest says that it has since upgraded its cash dispenser in Muswell Hill. A spokesman adds: “As we are now nearing completion of the roll-out of chip-and-PIN, the opportunities for gangs to exploit the old magnetic strip technology are reducing.”

When Times Money raised the Parkers’ plight with Ross Anderson, a specialist in card fraud at Cambridge University, he said that thousands of other bank customers may have suffered a similar ordeal at the hands of the big banks.

Dr Anderson accuses the banks of deliberately turning their backs on customers who fall victim to credit-card fraud and perpetuating the myth that chip-and-PIN cards cannot be cloned. He says: “Banks have been allowed to get away with blaming customers for fraud. As a result, employees in banks are lazy and careless when it comes to dealing with card fraud.”

Beware of the scam artists

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