How to tell a real bank from a fake one

Someone phones, texts or emails claiming to be your bank. They are calm, they know your name, and there is a problem with your account. This is the most expensive scam in the UK by a wide margin, and it works on careful people, which is worth saying out loud.

The script

It varies in the details and almost never in the shape:

1. Contact you first. A call, a text, an email. Sometimes all three, to build pressure. 2. Establish that something is wrong. A suspicious payment, an attempted login, an account "compromised". Something urgent but not yet catastrophic. 3. Make themselves the solution. They are the fraud team. They are on your side. They may even tell you to be careful of scams. 4. Move your money "somewhere safe". A new account, in your name, that they have set up for you.

Step four is the entire point. Everything before it exists to make it sound reasonable.

What a real bank will never do

• Ask you to move money to a "safe account". This is not a thing. No bank has ever done it. If

you remember one sentence from this page, make it this one.

• Ask for your full PIN or password, or a card reader code, or the one-time code they just sent

you. A genuine code text says so in the text itself.

• Ask you to help catch a corrupt employee, or to keep the call secret from branch staff.
• Send a courier to collect your card.
• Pressure you. A real fraud team is content for you to hang up and call back.

The caller ID proves nothing

A number displayed on your phone can be set to anything, including the number printed on the back of your own card. The same is true of the sender name on a text, which is why a scam message can drop into the same conversation thread as genuine ones from your bank. Where a message appears tells you nothing about who sent it.

The one move

Hang up. Wait a full minute, or use a different phone. Then call the number on the back of your card, or open your banking app and use the contact option inside it.

The wait matters: on a landline an attacker could historically hold the line open, and the habit is cheap. On a mobile it is instant.

If you are already mid-transfer

Stop. There is no payment so urgent that it cannot survive five minutes of checking. If money has already gone, call your bank immediately on a number you found yourself and report it to Action Fraud. Speed genuinely matters here.

Where we can help

If it arrived as a message rather than a call, paste it into our scam checker before you do anything else. If it contains a link, our link checker will tell you what the domain really is without opening it.

Neither tool can help with a phone call, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. For calls, the answer is the one above: hang up and dial the number on your card.