- Service Areas / Access & Identity
Impersonation
- Access & Identity
How These Cases Work
Someone posing as your bank, a government official, or a person you know, asking you to move money urgently.
These are the most-reported frauds in most countries, and the most convincingly staged.
01
The Call Comes From the Right Number
The details are usually correct. They know your name, the last transactions on your account, sometimes the branch you use. The number displayed is your bank’s real one — caller ID is trivial to falsify. If it’s a government or police impersonation, there will be a case reference and often a name you can look up and find is real.
The money moves because everything checks out, and because you’re given no room to stop and verify. That’s the design, not a lapse on your part.
02
What an Investigation Involves
Actionreclaims Investigations
We start with the receiving account. Money moved under impersonation almost never stays where it was first sent — it’s broken up and moved onward within hours, often through accounts belonging to people who don’t know they’re involved. Following that chain to where the funds settled is the core of the work.
Alongside it we document the approach itself: the numbers and addresses used, the timing, the script. These operations run at scale rather than one-to-one, and the same infrastructure usually appears across multiple cases. Establishing that changes how a bank reads your claim — it moves you from an isolated incident to part of a pattern they may already be tracking.
- Inside the Investigation
How We Work These Cases
Four stages, in the order we work them.
Receiving Account Trace
Where the money landed first, and everywhere it moved within hours.
Onward Chain Mapping
Following funds through layered accounts to where they finally settled.
Approach Documentation
Numbers, addresses, and scripts used — often linking your case to others.
Evidence File
Findings documented so your bank, card issuer, or the police can act.
- Clients
In their own words
“It was my bank’s actual number on the screen. My bank’s first response was that I’d authorised it. The report is what changed that conversation.”
Helen
United Kingdom
4.9 Rating
- FAQ
Common Questions
Not usually. Authorised push payment fraud is recognised as its own category, and in a number of jurisdictions there are reimbursement rules that apply specifically to it. Banks decline on first application routinely. What tends to change the outcome is evidence showing how the deception was staged and where the funds went.
Caller ID is straightforward to falsify and there is no verification behind it. The same applies to SMS sender IDs, which is why a fraudulent message often appears in the same thread as real ones from your bank. This is worth documenting in a claim, because it undermines any suggestion that you should have spotted it.
Immediately, if the payment was recent. Funds are moved onward within hours, and the realistic window for stopping money at the receiving bank is short. That said, tracing remains possible long afterwards, and a claim or police report is still worth pursuing once the money has moved.
Yes. Invoice redirection works on the same principle and we handle it the same way. These cases often involve a compromised email account somewhere in the chain, which is worth establishing early since it affects both the claim and whether it is likely to happen again.
Sometimes partly. We can usually establish which accounts received the money and what connects them, and occasionally that leads somewhere identifiable. More often it produces something better for your purposes: evidence that the accounts belong to a network, which is what banks and police act on.