UK banks must refund APP fraud victims up to £85,000 — but many crypto scam losses fall outside the rules. Where the line sits, what's actually recoverable, and the steps to take in the first 48 hours.
Important Risk Warning
This is not financial advice. Cryptocurrency investments are highly volatile. The value of your investment can go down as well as up, and you could lose all the money you invest. Don't invest unless you're prepared to lose all the money you put in.
London — Whether you get your money back after a crypto scam in the UK mostly comes down to one technical question: what kind of payment did you make, and to whom? Get the answer "a bank transfer to a fraudster's UK account," and the rules are firmly on your side. Get the answer "I sent the crypto myself," and they mostly aren't.
That line decides thousands of cases a year, so it's worth understanding precisely — ideally before you need to.
Since 7 October 2024, UK payment firms have been required to reimburse victims of authorised push payment (APP) fraud — cases where you were tricked into sending money yourself. The protection covers payments made through Faster Payments or CHAPS to another UK account, up to £85,000 per claim, with refunds usually due within five working days, though investigations can stretch to 35, per the FCA's consumer guidance.
The bar for refusing is high. Banks can decline only where the customer was grossly negligent — ignoring an explicit, specific scam warning, for instance — and that exception doesn't apply to vulnerable customers at all. There's no requirement that you were foolish-proof; falling for a convincing investment pitch is exactly what the rules exist for.
So far, so good. Now the crypto-shaped hole.
The reimbursement scheme covers sterling transfers between UK accounts. It does not cover the crypto leg of anything. Send bitcoin from your own wallet to a scammer's address, and no payment firm sits in the middle owing you a refund — the transfer happened on a blockchain, not through Faster Payments, and it's irreversible by design.
The messy middle is where most real cases live. The classic pattern: a scammer persuades you to open an account at a legitimate exchange, you transfer £20,000 of your own money there by bank transfer, buy crypto, then send it on to the fraudster's wallet. Your bank payment went to an account in your own name at a genuine firm — which makes the reimbursement analysis genuinely contested. Some claims succeed on the basis that the bank should have spotted the wider scam pattern and intervened; others fail because the regulated payment, viewed alone, went exactly where you told it to.
Two practical consequences. First, never let anyone tell you a claim is hopeless just because crypto was involved — the route the money took matters more than the asset. Second, paid "crypto recovery" services promising to retrieve stolen coins are overwhelmingly a second scam aimed at people already bleeding. Treat unsolicited recovery offers as fraud until proven otherwise.
Speed changes outcomes here, so the order matters.
Call your bank immediately — use the 159 anti-fraud number — and report the payments as fraud. Funds sometimes get frozen mid-route, and your reimbursement clock starts with the report. Then report to Action Fraud, because a crime reference number strengthens everything that follows. If an exchange account was involved, notify the platform; exchanges can freeze accounts and flag destination wallets faster than people expect. And preserve everything — messages, payment receipts, wallet addresses, the platform names the scammer used. Cases are won and lost on this paper.
If your bank rejects a claim you think the rules cover, escalate in writing and then take it to the Financial Ombudsman Service, which is free, and which has been notably willing to look at whether banks should have intervened in scam patterns rather than judging each payment in isolation.
Recovery rates for money pushed through bank transfers have improved sharply since the 2024 rules. Recovery rates for crypto sent directly to a scammer's wallet remain dismal, reimbursement rules or not. That asymmetry is precisely why fraudsters work so hard to get victims onto the crypto rails quickly — and why your bank throws warnings at exchange transfers.
If you take one thing from this: the moment anyone you've never met asks you to move money into crypto for an "opportunity," "tax payment," "account verification" or "safe account," the conversation is over. Not because crypto is inherently a con — but because at that specific moment, statistically, it is.
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