HSBC and Monzo, 2023 to 2025
Four cases from fraud work
Before the MSc I worked as a fraud investigator, first at HSBC and then at Monzo. Most of the job was deciding individual cases. What I learnt most from were the times a group of cases pointed to a problem further upstream.
- HSBC UK
- Fraud investigator, Aug 2023 to Jul 2024
- Monzo Bank
- Fraud investigator, Jul 2024 to Jul 2025
- Authority
- Up to £20,000 at HSBC, £10,000 at Monzo
- Quality checks
- 100% at HSBC, 95%+ at Monzo
The work
At HSBC I investigated authorised push payment scams. I looked at transaction velocity, counterparties and behaviour to reach a decision, applied the CRM Code to decide on reimbursement, and could reimburse up to £20,000 without escalating. I also worked with other banks under industry information-sharing arrangements to recover funds.
At Monzo I worked alerts flagged by the fraud detection models across scams, card fraud and account takeover, with authority up to £10,000. I also worked the chargebacks and disputes queue. Across both roles this came to thousands of cases a year.
At both banks I handled fraud against business customers as well as personal ones, and raised internal suspicious activity reports to the nominated officer where the evidence pointed to money laundering. My cases were scored by the quality team and my line manager: 100% at HSBC and 95%+ at Monzo.
Four cases
A payment feature with no warning
HSBC launched a Pay by Bank App feature without briefing the fraud team. Cases linked to it started reaching my desk. When I compared them, I could see that a code entered in the app could send up to £25,000 without the customer warning appearing. A fraud analyst put me in touch with the engineer responsible and I took him through the cases. The feature was paused, and the product team fixed it with the analyst and me.
Several cases, one person
At Monzo, a small number of cases on different accounts each involved someone passing the facial recognition check and then moving money out. When I put them side by side, it was the same face each time. I reported the match, worked with the technical team to identify the person, and helped define a detection rule so the pattern is now caught and the payments blocked.
A false positive with a pattern
Customers who added a new card to Apple Pay and spent straight away were being flagged as fraud, because the sequence looks like a stolen card being provisioned to another device. It is also what a genuine customer does with a new card. I collected case evidence and escalated it to the fraud detection team so the threshold and features could be reviewed.
Questioning case guidance
A senior colleague advised closing cases where the payment looked like an investment. Some of them showed signs of a scam, and closing them could have left a victim without reimbursement they were owed under the CRM Code. I raised it with him first and then with management, and the guidance was changed.
Tools
HSBC's internal fraud case-management system, Monzo's case-management tools, Looker dashboards and CIFAS.
Client and customer details from this work are confidential and are not included here.