RBS admits 2,000 hit by fraud after phone app gaffe

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) chief executive Stephen Hester has admitted up to 2,000 customers have been the victims of fraudsters who targeted the group’s Get Cash phone app.

RBS and Natwest pulled the app in October and Hester (pictured) said in a letter to Treasury Select Committee chairman Andrew Tyrie that it would not be relaunched until security had improved.

‘In total, less than 2,000 of our customers were directly affected by the fraud and all those impacted have received a full refund with most receiving it immediately,’ he said.

The Get Cash application was launched in June this year, to enable customers to withdraw cash using a secure code without cancelling their card.

Hester said RBS’s intelligence suggested fraudsters had used various methods such as phishing to capture customer information and falsely register for mobile banking. The fraud losses had been compounded by a code error within the bank’s Emergency Cash service, meaning that the Get Cash app did not remember a customer’s daily ATM limit.

He added that once the app is relaunched, six additional controls will be introduced to give greater protection to customers.

This has been a bad year for technology at the taxpayer-owned bank. RBS had to set aside more than £100 million to cover the cost of compensate customers affected by a major computer systems crash in June.