{"id":843196,"date":"2026-08-04T12:12:14","date_gmt":"2026-08-04T12:12:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/843196\/"},"modified":"2026-08-04T12:12:14","modified_gmt":"2026-08-04T12:12:14","slug":"metro-bank-customer-fights-for-14000-refund-after-ai-linked-fraud-scams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/843196\/","title":{"rendered":"Metro Bank customer fights for \u00a314,000 refund after AI-linked fraud | Scams"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Metro Bank<\/a> customer has told of his fight to get more than \u00a314,000 back after its systems failed to stop\u00a0a fraud involving the AI chatbot Claude.<\/p>\n

Zoli Rutter, a businessman from Sussex, had a total of \u00a314,244 taken from his bank account. The scam involved fraudsters buying credits to use Claude.<\/p>\n

When Metro Bank messaged Rutter to ask whether an attempted transaction was legitimate, he replied \u201cno\u201d, but the criminals were\u00a0able to make a series of subsequent transactions of between \u00a390 and \u00a3200.<\/p>\n

The fraud is the latest to be linked to Anthropic<\/a>, the company behind the Claude family of AI tools.<\/p>\n

In May, a Claude user based in the US told Guardian Money<\/a> about how gift cards to use the chatbot had been bought using his financial details. Other users shared similar stories on Reddit<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Claude has been in the news a lot lately. Last week, the Financial Conduct Authority<\/a> (FCA) appeared to endorse Claude when it said Anthropic would provide access to the tool for firms taking part in a hi-tech FCA initiative (which lets financial companies safely experiment with advanced AI) in order \u201cto help speed up their development work\u201d.<\/p>\n

However, this week it was revealed that some people\u2019s conversations with Claude were publicly available online<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Rutter had been paying about \u00a315 a month to use the chatbot for a few months when the scam happened.<\/p>\n

The fraudsters used the Metro Bank debit card linked to the customer\u2019s Anthropic account to make the payments and buy credits to use on the platform. Photograph: Christopher Thomond\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

He had been using the new technology to track and analyse business invoices.<\/p>\n

The fraudsters used the Metro Bank debit card linked to his Anthropic account to make the payments and buy credits for the\u00a0platform.<\/p>\n

On 19 June, Metro Bank spotted a suspicious transaction for \u00a390.90 and texted Rutter to ask whether he had authorised it. When he texted back to say that he had not, he received another text to say his account would be frozen. However, just the suspect transaction was blocked and not his account.<\/p>\n

Fraudulent transactions then continued. While some were blocked, says the bank, many were not. Metro eventually froze his card the day after the scam started, but by then, more than \u00a314,000 worth of payments had gone through.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for the bank says that owing to the \u201ccomplex nature of the fraud, regretfully some payments were processed\u201d before it blocked the card fully.<\/p>\n

After Guardian Money got in touch, Metro Bank temporarily refunded Rutter while a chargeback refund was sought from Anthropic.<\/p>\n

In a statement, the bank said: \u201cThis is a concerning case involving\u00a0a third party that the customer had made previous genuine payments to and provided\u00a0card details [to], which were then used to make a series of purchases without Mr Rutter\u2019s knowledge.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe recognise how worrying and frustrating [the] experience has been for Mr Rutter. Metro Bank has refunded Mr Rutter while we progress a chargeback dispute request with Anthropic to refund the money that had been taken.\u201d<\/p>\n

It added: \u201cWe would encourage customers to contact their bank as\u00a0soon as they notice any unusual transactions or are aware of any compromise to accounts where their financial details are stored.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anthropic says a coordinated gang had used Rutter\u2019s cards to buy\u00a0credits to use Claude. It says it has no evidence that the compromised card details had come from its own systems. The user behind the fraud has been banned, it adds.<\/p>\n

Anthropic says anyone who has been charged for a fraudulent purchase should contact its support<\/a> site and the charges will be\u00a0refunded.<\/p>\n

Rutter has since been refunded by Anthropic, and the temporary refund from Metro Bank is due to be taken back by the bank.<\/p>\n

Metro Bank told him in a letter that he had not received the service it expected its customers to get, and it offered him \u00a3300 by way of\u00a0compensation.<\/p>\n

Rutter says he intends to make a complaint about what happened to the Financial Ombudsman Service.<\/p>\n

The bank says it has taken steps\u00a0to prevent delays in cards being blocked.<\/p>\n

Anyone who has been affected by an unauthorised card fraud is advised to contact their bank immediately and ask for\u00a0a\u00a0refund. They may then be asked to fill out forms detailing what happened.The FCA says the refund should be in a customer\u2019s account by the end of the next business day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Metro Bank customer has told of his fight to get more than \u00a314,000 back after its systems…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":843197,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-843196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/843196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=843196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/843196\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/843197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=843196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=843196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=843196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}