Hi Everyone, I'm going to tell you my experience to date so that others may learn from it. It's not quite over yet but I think it will be by next week. Feel free to ask me any questions. I live in SW Scotland and in Feb 2014 I approached a local family run company to quote for double glazed replacement windows. The sales director sent me the quote from his email address. I responded with a query and then accepted the quote by email. His email address was then automatically added to my Outlook email address book. The work was carried out in May 2014. The fitters did a really good job and I love the windows so there's no problem there. The problem started on 2nd June 2014. I received an invoice from the company asking me for immediate payment but that invoice didn't give me one jot of information on how to pay them. In fact it was very poor, it had no company reg number and no T & Cs either. I sent a quick email to the sales director (using the address already stored in Outlook) asking for payment details. I got a response which mentioned 'New bank account' signed by the director from the sales director's email address. I logged onto my bank account (Cahoot) and setup the payment online. This all happened early afternoon. Then around 4:30pm I received a second email from the sales director's email address but signed by the girl in the office. It gave me different bank details. I presumed that the company were in the process of changing bank accounts and that maybe the directors hadn't communicated it yet to the staff. It was too late in the day to check with them when I picked up the email. At about 7:30 that night Cahoot performed a security call. In it they asked me if the payment was going to the windows company to which I said yes. The next day I received an email from the sales director asking me where the money was because they hadn't received it. I was given the run around until the 11th June when I had become very suspicious and stopped communicating with him. In the meantime the bank were trying to trace where the money had gone. They sent me the necessary proof on the 20th June. I then got in touch with the company and sent the document to them on a different email address. I told them they could now put pressure on Barclays bank because they had definitely received the money. They instantly replied asking why Barclays when they were with Bank of Scotland. I sent them all the previous emails and the girl in the office phoned me and said they had never sent the emails to me. She asked me what I intended to do and I said I was going to phone the police, which I did. The police investigation is ongoing and there are now 8 other victims none of them to do with the windows company. Not once did this company try to talk to me or investigate the circumstances. Their first response was when I was on the phone to the office girl and the sales director was asking in the background if I was insured. The next thing they did was get a solicitor involved and sent me a demand to pay up. I went to my own solicitor and showed her the email. She told me I have paid. The company did a few things that made me very suspicious about them. They never chased me for the payment when I had told them they should received my payment by 3rd June at the latest and they deleted all their emails which were police evidence. I had my computer checked to ensure I hadn't been hacked which I hadn't. I then had the email headers looked at by a computer expert and they have shown that the so called fraudulent email was sent to me via the window company's server. It looks as if someone within the company logged onto a google email account (which is largely anonymous) and somehow intercepted my email but not quickly enough to stop another person in the company from also seeing my email. My next step was to complain to my bank. There had been no warnings on their screens to tell me that I wasn't protected by the Faster Payments System or that they don't check the account name. The bank's response was to tell me they didn't want the criminals to know this! I said if that was the case they could have told me during the security call. They dismissed my complaint. I went to the Financial Ombudsman. The adjudicator also dismissed my complaint twice but I appealed and it finally reached the Financial Ombudsman. The bank had very conveniently lost the recording of the security call but somehow the FO managed to get them to find it. It was because of that security call that she upheld my complaint. She says that the bank led me to believe that they checked the account name. She also said that the bank had authorised the payment and not me. She ruled that the bank should re-imburse me for all my legal costs, the debt owed to the window company and any other costs so that I am not out of pocket. This decision was made in May 2015 from my initial complaint in Aug 2014. My solicitor was amazed at what I had achieved. I would say that the Faster Payments System is not secure enough. The customer has no way of checking that the bank details provided by a company actually belong to that company. Criminals are now putting people into companies to spot loopholes in their security/admin procedures in order to send out fraudulent bank details to unsuspecting victims like me. You could ring a company to ask them for their bank details and the person you were speaking to could give you their personal information and you would be none the wiser. There is nowhere to verify that an account belongs to a company. Once you have paid the money it is impossible to get it back unless the bank made the error. I believe that in other countries they use a third check like the company reg number or an NI number. When the bank finally got in touch with me in August this year I asked them who makes the decisions on the court case if they are now paying. They said that I do no matter what the cost! They also said that they didn't want me to settle out of court and they wanted the hearing to go ahead. I have put in endless hourss of work on this and accumulated some very good evidence to defend my case. A legal debate is scheduled for 22nd October but my solicitor wants to use Counsel for the debate. They are saying they have struggled to find anything in law to help them and have had to go right back to Victorian law. They say the contract was formed via email and the company should have ensured that their email system was secure because I had relied on it. At the mention of Counsel the bank have started squirming. They rang me on the 22nd and said they were refusing to indemnify me after that date. I went back to the Financial Ombudsman with this information and she told me that wasn't quite what had been discussed. So everything is currently up in the air with the case. It looks very much like I will have to settle out of court because I cannot afford to fund this on my own. If the criminals are part of the company they will receive the money twice. I had hoped that the bank would help me see this case through to its conclusion so that I could have possibly had an outcome good enough to help others that follow in my footsteps. I may never know who was responsible for sending me that email because the police are just following the money. I now have a lovely set of windows with no guarantee.

Blame some of the guys posting on the Ingeus thread for this one... On the whatdotheyknow.com web site, a FoI request was made to the DWP in respect to mandation notices & sanctions issued by WP providers. Of particular interest is one of the attachments in the DWP response. The original request: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/threats_of_saction_issued_by_wor The pdf of interest: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/152662/response/376951/attach/5/WP%20JR%20Assurance%20letter%20v%20final%203.pdf Well worth reading, and I'd suggest printing out copies to use in an appeal if the WP provider's notice does not contain the Annex A wording in full.