Banks: Fraud Prevention

Lord Hayward Excerpts

Monday 20th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

It is exactly because the Government were not satisfied with the progress being made that the former Home Secretary asked HMRC to inspect the police response to fraud. It responded on 2 April with 16 recommendations that the Government, together with banks and the police, are in the process of implementing. There is a range of recommendations, including a more co-ordinated national response and more support for the customer. Action Fraud is also introducing a more responsive service so that, if you report a fraud, you will get feedback from the banks; that was not necessarily the case before. I am not sure whether we need more legislation; we need to see how the initiatives I referred to work through.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend referred to the policies adopted by banks. This morning, I received a completely unannounced phone call from Barclays, asking me questions relating to my account details. Is it not possible for banks, where they know that they will contact customers in relation to the contents of their accounts, to send them an email or a letter beforehand rather than calling on an ad hoc basis?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

If I got a telephone call from the bank, I would hang up and then ring back. An additional measure will be introduced later this year for larger payments and payments where the banks think that there is a risk, in that they will have what they call multifactor authentication. In that case, they would text my noble friend saying that a payment was going through and asking him to confirm it. In the case my noble friend referred to, as I said, my instinct would be to hang up and ring the number on the back of my card.