Two-thirds of UK fraud comes from abroad. How to get your money back from the bank: 5 business days and an £85,000 cap

On 24 September 2026 the Home Office announced that the UK and Cambodia have signed a Memorandum of Understanding aimed at scam centres — the industrial-scale operations where fraud is scripted, staffed in shifts and pointed at thousands of people at once. The document was signed on 23 September, and it is the first arrangement that lets British and Cambodian law enforcement work these networks jointly: sharing data, coordinating activity against the gangs, bringing people to court and supporting those who were trafficked into the compounds.

For anyone living in Britain, one number in that announcement matters most. The Minister for Fraud, Lord Hanson, put it plainly: more than two-thirds of the fraud affecting the UK originates overseas. That is why domestic policing alone does not close the problem — and why the question "what do I do once the money has gone" applies to almost everyone.

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What is a scam centre and why are they abroad?

A scam centre is fraud on a production line: the scripts are written in advance, operators work shifts, and thousands of targets are processed at the same time. The tactics include fake romantic relationships, bogus investments and impersonated bank security teams. The world's biggest cluster of these centres has grown up in South East Asia.

There is another side to it. The people sitting at the keyboards are often victims themselves: in the Home Office's words, frequently trafficked foreign nationals, trapped and forced to carry out the fraud under threat of torture. That is why support for trafficking victims is written into the agreement with Cambodia.

What Britain brings: training for Cambodian law enforcement in cyber investigations, digital forensics and investigative procedures. The two governments will also work through the Global Fraud Taskforce, developed jointly by the UK and INTERPOL, to identify suspects, support operations to dismantle the centres and trace the illicit money that funds them.

This continues a line visible over recent months. In October 2025 the UK and the US imposed joint sanctions on a network running scam centres across South East Asia, freezing millions of pounds of UK property; in March 2026 sanctions were extended to the crypto network moving the money. Domestically the government runs an Online Crime Centre, bringing together government, police, intelligence agencies, banks and tech firms. The wider fraud strategy is backed by £250 million, and the government puts the scale of the problem like this: one in fourteen adults and one in four businesses have been victims.

How many people in Britain are actually hit by fraud?

The better guide here is not police data but the Crime Survey for England and Wales. The Office for National Statistics published the latest figures on 23 July 2026, covering the year to March 2026:

— 4.5 million fraud incidents in the year (4.2 million the year before — the change is not statistically significant);
— 3.8 million victims, up 10% on the previous year (3.4 million);
— 7.8% of adults were victims in the previous 12 months, up 0.7 percentage points;
— bank and credit account fraud rose 15%, to around 2.8 million incidents;
— other fraud fell 37%, to around 151,000 incidents.

So the overall count is flat while the number of people affected is up — and the part that grows is the part that hits accounts and cards. Over ten years the picture is starker still: compared with the year to March 2017 (around 3.4 million incidents), fraud is up 32%, while most other crime against individuals has fallen.

Where do you report it?

The first and most urgent step is to call your bank. Not the police, not a solicitor you know — the bank, and the faster the better, because that is what can still stop the payment. The report comes after.

One change many people have missed: on 4 December 2025 the City of London Police launched a new reporting system, Report Fraud, replacing Action Fraud and the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau. You can report online (signing up or continuing as a guest) or call 0300 123 2040 — that covers England and Wales. If you are in Scotland and have lost money, report the crime to Police Scotland.

The smaller channels also work:

— forward suspicious emails to report@phishing.gov.uk, where the National Cyber Security Centre looks at them;
— forward suspicious text messages to 7726 — it is free and goes to your mobile provider;
— report scam or misleading adverts to the Advertising Standards Authority, including ads in search results and on social media.

Does the bank have to refund you if you made the transfer yourself?

Yes — and this is the part worth knowing. This is authorised push payment (APP) fraud: you were tricked into sending the money yourself. Banks used to handle such cases as they saw fit. Since 7 October 2024, under Payment Systems Regulator rules, reimbursement is mandatory, for payments made on or after that date.

What the rules cover:

— individuals, microenterprises and charities;
— transfers between UK accounts over Faster Payments and CHAPS;
— all types of APP fraud, from fake bank security teams to romance scams and bogus investments;
— all types of payment firms: high street banks, building societies, smaller payment and e-money firms. The exceptions are credit unions, municipal banks and national savings banks.

What they do not cover: card payments, cash and cheques, which have their own protections; unauthorised fraud, where someone uses your card without your knowledge, which is a different category with different protections; and civil disputes, where you paid a genuine seller and the goods never arrived or were defective — there the Consumer Rights Act applies, and our guide to returning faulty goods is the more useful one.

How long does it take and how much comes back?

The deadlines and limits are fixed, and they are worth memorising:

— you must claim within 13 months of making the fraudulent payment;
— you should be reimbursed within 5 business days of making the claim;
— if the firm needs longer to gather information it can "stop the clock", but it must reach an outcome within 35 business days;
— the firm may apply an excess of up to £100. That is a choice, not an obligation: some apply the full amount, some less, some none at all. It cannot be applied to vulnerable consumers;
— the maximum claim is £85,000, which the regulator says covers over 99% of claims; individual firms may choose to pay more.

You are expected to move too: respond promptly to the firm's requests for information (after checking the request is genuine) and either report to the police yourself or consent to the firm reporting on your behalf.

When can a bank refuse?

There are exactly two grounds: if you were complicit in the fraud, and if you were grossly negligent. The regulator states explicitly that gross negligence is a high bar — it is not "you missed a typo in a web address". And the exception does not apply to vulnerable consumers at all.

One more thing about warnings. When you send a transfer, the payee name is checked through Confirmation of Payee, which compares the name you typed with the name on the account. If it says the name does not match and you send the money anyway, arguing with the bank afterwards gets harder. That is the exact point where a few seconds of pause is worth more than everything else.

What if the bank says no?

Go to the Financial Ombudsman Service. It is free, you do not need a lawyer, and it is also the route when the loss is above £85,000 and the bank has paid only the cap. The ombudsman's own compensation limit is £430,000, and it looks at each case on its individual merits. The Payment Systems Regulator itself does not investigate individual cases: it sets the rules, not the outcome of your claim. How the ombudsman route works and what deadlines apply is set out in our guide to complaints.

What should newcomers know?

First: reimbursement is a payment-system rule, not a benefit and not public funds. It attaches to a UK account, not to your immigration status. Contacting your bank and reporting to the police has no visa consequences.

Second: the approach often arrives in your own language — on Telegram and WhatsApp, from a "bank security team", from "a friend whose number has changed", from platforms offering crypto investments. Newcomers are more exposed not because they are naive but because the local normal is still unfamiliar: it is hard to tell whether a real bank is calling, what a genuine HMRC letter looks like, what does and does not happen here. The simple rule: no bank, no HMRC and no Home Office will ever ask you to move money to a "safe account". There is no such account.

Third: weak English is not a reason to stay silent. Firms must take a customer's vulnerability into account when assessing a claim, the ombudsman is free, and a Report Fraud claim can be filed online without a phone call. Silence is the expensive option: 13 months sounds generous right up to the moment you discover fourteen have passed.

And a practical footnote. Money in UK accounts is protected by more than the reimbursement rules: it helps to understand how cards, transfers and credit history work here, and what to watch when changing currency and sending money abroad — most scams begin exactly where someone does not know what a normal transaction is supposed to look like.