Metro Bank let fraudsters drain £14,244 to buy Claude credits after customer flagged suspicious charge

£14k drained to buy Claude credits, bank let it through

A Sussex businessman lost £14,244 to fraudsters who used his card to buy credits for the AI chatbot Claude. His bank caught the very first suspicious charge and warned him, then let more than £14,000 more slip through before freezing the card. A businessman in Sussex watched £14,244 drain out of his Metro Bank account. The money went on credits for Claude, the AI chatbot he already paid to use. Two things failed at once. Criminals had turned a chatbot into a way to cash out stolen cards. And his bank spotted the first fraudulent charge, warned him, then let more than £14,000 more go through. Zoli Rutter had been paying about £15 a month for Claude for a few months, he told Guardian Money. He used it to track and analyse business invoices. The fraudsters used the Metro debit card linked to his Anthropic account to buy credits on the platform. Caught, then waved through On 19 June, Metro spotted a suspicious transaction for £90.90. It texted Rutter to ask whether he had authorised it. He texted back to say he had not. He then got another message: Metro would freeze his account. In the event, the bank blocked only that one transaction, not the account. The fraudulent charges kept coming, each between £90 and £200. Metro blocked some and missed many. It froze the card the day after the scam began, but by then more than £14,000 had gone. The bank blamed the "complex nature of the fraud." It had processed some payments, it said, before it could block the card fully. A chatbot as a cash register The mechanics are what make this new. A coordinated gang used Rutter's card details to buy Claude credits, according to Anthropic. The company said it had no evidence the details came from its own systems. It had also banned the user behind the fraud. Anyone wrongly charged should contact its support, it added, and it will refund the charges. It was not a one-off. In May, a US Claude user told Guardian Money that fraudsters had bought gift cards for the chatbot with his financial details. Others posted similar accounts on Reddit. AI credits are becoming a target in their own right. It is part of a wider AI-era fraud economy that banks are racing to keep up with. Who pays The refund became a tangle. After Guardian Money got in touch, Metro temporarily refunded Rutter while it chased a chargeback from Anthropic. Anthropic has since refunded him directly, so the bank will now claw back its temporary payment. Metro told Rutter in a letter that he had not received the service it expects. It offered him £300 in compensation. Rutter says he intends to complain to the Financial Ombudsman Service. Metro says it has taken steps to prevent delays in blocking cards in future. The case lands in a busy month for Claude. Last week the FCA appeared to endorse the chatbot, agreeing to give firms in its high-tech sandbox access to it. This week it emerged that some people's Claude conversations were publicly visible online. Anthropic has separately moved to verify who its users are. The underlying problem is simpler than any of it. As more people save a card to pay for AI, that card becomes a target. The safeguards on both sides are still catching up.

Metro Bank customer fights for £14,000 refund after AI-linked fraud

Lender was told money was being taken without authorisation, with cash used to buy credits for Claude chatbot A Metro Bank customer has told of his fight to get more than £14,000 back after its systems failed to stop a fraud involving the AI chatbot Claude. Zoli Rutter, a businessman from Sussex, had a total of £14,244 taken from his bank account. The scam involved fraudsters buying credits to use Claude. When Metro Bank messaged Rutter to ask whether an attempted transaction was legitimate, he replied "no", but the criminals were able to make a series of subsequent transactions of between £90 and £200. The fraud is the latest to be linked to Anthropic, the company behind the Claude family of AI tools. In May, a Claude user based in the US told Guardian Money about how gift cards to use the chatbot had been bought using his financial details. Other users shared similar stories on Reddit. Claude has been in the news a lot lately. Last week, the Financial Conduct Authority (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 "to help speed up their development work". However, this week it was revealed that some people's conversations with Claude were publicly available online. Rutter had been paying about £15 a month to use the chatbot for a few months when the scam happened. He had been using the new technology to track and analyse business invoices. The fraudsters used the Metro Bank debit card linked to his Anthropic account to make the payments and buy credits for the platform. On 19 June, Metro Bank spotted a suspicious transaction for £90.90 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. 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 £14,000 worth of payments had gone through. A spokesperson for the bank says that owing to the "complex nature of the fraud, regretfully some payments were processed" before it blocked the card fully. After Guardian Money got in touch, Metro Bank temporarily refunded Rutter while a chargeback refund was sought from Anthropic. In a statement, the bank said: "This is a concerning case involving a third party that the customer had made previous genuine payments to and provided card details [to], which were then used to make a series of purchases without Mr Rutter's knowledge. "We 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." It added: "We would encourage customers to contact their bank as soon as they notice any unusual transactions or are aware of any compromise to accounts where their financial details are stored." Anthropic says a coordinated gang had used Rutter's cards to buy credits 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. Anthropic says anyone who has been charged for a fraudulent purchase should contact its support site and the charges will be refunded. Rutter has since been refunded by Anthropic, and the temporary refund from Metro Bank is due to be taken back by the bank. Metro Bank told him in a letter that he had not received the service it expected its customers to get, and it offered him £300 by way of compensation. Rutter says he intends to make a complaint about what happened to the Financial Ombudsman Service. The bank says it has taken steps to prevent delays in cards being blocked. Anyone who has been affected by an unauthorised card fraud is advised to contact their bank immediately and ask for a refund. They may then be asked to fill out forms detailing what happened.The FCA says the refund should be in a customer's account by the end of the next business day.