Jeweller loses £50k in bank scam

A jeweller, who asked to remain anonymous, has lost nearly £50,000 to a scam in which fraudsters posed as Barclays Bank’s fraud department, the National Fraud Helpline revealed.

The scam took place in April 2024, when the jeweller received a phone call from someone claiming to be ‘Andrew’ from Barclays, who warned him of unusual activity on his account.

He was told that a payment of £18,123 had been paid to Energy One Limited, and asked to call back on a cloned Barclays phone number for “legitimacy reasons” and quote a reference number.

The scam included using the same telephone hold music as the jeweller’s bank, cloning the bank’s phone number and telling the victim he could double check it’s correct on Google and asking the jeweller to confirm details such as their overdraft limit.

Believing he was now speaking to ‘Charlie Adams’ from Barclays fraud team, the victim was instructed to log in to his business bank accounts on his desktop computer.

From there he unknowingly downloaded AnyDesk, a programme that gives third parties access to your computer.

The fraudsters had taken £48,451.78 from two accounts but he initially received just £30.21 back from Barclays before the offer of £100 in compensation

The jeweller, who is in his 70s, said the long-established family run jewellers is still recovering from the financial shock.

When Barclays offered the jeweller just £100 in compensation, he turned to National Fraud Helpline solicitors.

A law firm recovered £25,650 of his money from the bank after arguing that Barclays should have spotted the unusual activity on his bank account and prevented the payments.

He said: “It’s left me in a hole, and I don’t sleep very well. In order to be able to continue to function as a business, I had to borrow about £30,000 from my sister to give us some working capital. They even used the same horrible hold music that Barclays play, which I’ve heard so many times before in legitimate circumstances. There seemed no reason to think it was not them.”

Lena Abuagla, a lawyer at National Fraud Helpline, added: ‘We argued that Barclays should have noticed the irregular activity on our client’s account and that large amounts were suddenly being paid to a new payee.

“This was a very sophisticated scam. We have so far recovered half of the lost sums and are determined to get the rest of the money back. We will be taking the jeweller’s case to the Financial Ombudsman to help recover the rest of the money.”