Forex brokerCard chargeback117 days
Case A — the broker that "needed a tax payment to release funds"
A Reading-based retiree had deposited £24,400 with an offshore-licensed forex broker over fourteen months. When he attempted to withdraw, the broker requested a 15% "regulatory tax" against the balance before release. He paid the first instalment, was then asked for a second, and at that point contacted us.
The intake call identified a clean Visa chargeback route on the original deposits (the broker had violated its own withdrawal terms and was not licensed in the UK as claimed). We prepared a Visa 13.1 dispute pack covering eight of the eleven card deposits. The chargeback was filed through his issuing bank.
Outcome: partial recovery of £19,800 across the eight disputed transactions. The remaining three were outside the chargeback window. The "tax payments" themselves were unrecoverable via card (the merchant ID resolved to a payment processor in a non-cooperating jurisdiction). Closed at day 117.
Romance / APP fraudBank reimbursement164 days
Case B — eleven months, six transfers, one sending bank
A woman in her 50s, employed in healthcare, had sent six wire transfers totalling £41,200 over eleven months to a person she had met on a widely-known dating platform. The "investment opportunity" framing was added in month nine. By the time she contacted us, the relationship had been ended by the other party and the funds were gone.
We worked with her and her sister (acting as family liaison) to prepare an APP-fraud claim against her sending bank under the PSR reimbursement framework. The case file documented the long social-engineering arc and the absence of any "effective warning" from the bank at the time of the larger transfers.
Outcome: bank reimbursement of £29,500 under the CRM code, granted on review. The remaining shortfall corresponded to transfers below the threshold for mandatory reimbursement. Closed at day 164.
Crypto lossNo recovery72 days
Case C — the case we could not recover
An engineer in Manchester had transferred approximately 2.4 BTC from a personal wallet to a wallet provided by a "trading platform" he had been introduced to via a Telegram group. The receiving wallet routed funds within hours through Tornado Cash, then to several fresh addresses, and never touched a centralised exchange that we could trace.
We told him on the first call that the chances of recovering the crypto itself were low. He asked us to proceed anyway, and we did — at our reduced rate for low-probability cases, which is part of how we work.
Outcome: no recovery of the crypto. However, the GBP funding leg (one card transaction of £6,800 that had funded an exchange purchase shortly before the transfer) was reopened with the issuing bank as a separate Visa 13.6 claim and recovered in full. Closed at day 72.
Wire transferSWIFT recall23 days
Case D — the fast outcome that is the exception, not the rule
A small-business owner in Bristol had wired £62,000 to what he believed was a supplier in Hong Kong. The invoice had been intercepted and the beneficiary account details substituted. He realised within four working days when the genuine supplier asked when payment would arrive.
We worked with his bank's fraud team the same afternoon to lodge a SWIFT MT192 cancellation. The beneficiary bank had not yet credited the funds out of the receiving account.
Outcome: full recall of £62,000 at day 23. Outcomes this clean are rare and depend almost entirely on speed. The case is included here because it illustrates how much the first 48 hours matter.