Lost money to a Safe Account Scam?

At Refundee, safe account scams are one of the more common scams we deal with. Safe account scams have consistently made up a large percentage of the money lost by the UK public to Authorised Push Payments (APP) scams, and according to UK Finance, £55.1 million was lost in 2025 alone.

If you are the victim of a safe account scam and used a UK bank account, then you have options to recover your money.

As a regulated claims management company, if you’d like our help, just complete our online claim form or give us a call. Remember, you can do it yourself for free by taking your case to the Financial Ombudsman Service.

How do safe account scams work?

1. Safe account scams often begin before the phone even rings. Fraudsters can purchase your details online through data leaks. Or, you may have previously responded to a fake SMS impersonating a delivery company like Evri or the Royal Mail, HMRC, or the NHS and entered some personal details without thinking much of it. The fraudsters now have enough information to sound convincingly like your bank or the police when they call.
2. When they do call, they will most likely have spoofed your bank’s number. This means the call appears on your phone as a legitimate, recognisable number, or an SMS drops into the same thread as genuine messages from your bank. This is what makes safe account scams so difficult to detect, because every visual signal is telling you the contact is real.
3. Fraudsters are very smart in how they operate, and they will sound very sophisticated in the way they speak. They will conduct security checks, just like the bank would, and they will claim they are from your bank’s fraud department.
4. Once they have you on the line, they create a sense of urgency to make you panic. They will read out a list of large transactions they claim have been attempted on your account. They tell you that you have not made these payments, but someone is trying to take your money right now and you need to act quickly.
5. The scammers will sometimes use other banks as a way to deceive you, and you may receive calls or SMS messages from different numbers claiming they are working with your bank to prevent the fraud.
6. The scammers then present the scam: they tell you to move your money to a safe account they will provide information about immediately, to protect it. Believing you are following your bank’s instructions, you make the transfer. That account belongs to the fraudsters, and unfortunately, the money is gone. You have become a victim of what is known as a “safe account” scam.
7. Sometimes, the scammers will conduct a different type of ‘safe account’ scam and may also explain that, in order to protect your account, you are required to read out security codes to them. These will come through as text messages to your phone, again through spoofing the bank’s number.
8. These codes are, in fact, one-time passcodes that are used to authorise payments. This is the scammers making payments from your account without your knowledge, tricking you into reading out the codes for the payments to go through. These payments are unauthorised and should always be refunded by the bank under unauthorised fraud reimbursement rules.