Holidaymaker in Spain recovers 4,000 euros stolen following credit card theft, despite bank initially refusing

ING has reimbursed a banking client the 3,990 euros stolen from her credit card thanks to the intervention of Spanish consumers' organisation Facua.

The incident happened in August 2023, while the woman was on a holiday with her husband in Burgos. Her purse, which contained her phone, keys, wallet and two credit cards, was stolen while they were having breakfast in the hotel cafeteria.

Her husband called their bank, ING, as soon as they became aware of the theft. He tried reaching the bank more than six times, but his call would go straight to a voicemail requesting access codes sent to the stolen phone to authenticate the procedure.

The man then contacted his daughter and asked her to go to the bank to inform them of the problem. Shortly afterwards, she called him back and told him that the cards were supposedly blocked. However, the man, co-signatory of his wife's account, started receiving messages informing him of several transactions made with the stolen cards. The thief had withdrawn 2,490 euros in cash and made unauthorised purchases amounting to 1,500 euros.

The couple's daughter went back to the branch, where an employee blocked both the cards and the bank account, and marked the transactions as "fraudulent". The couple then filed a police report with surveillance footage from the hotel cameras. They continued to pursue the complaint after returning to La Coruña.

However, ING refused to reimburse the stolen amount, arguing that the cardholder "has the obligation to adopt the necessary precautions to safeguard the card and its security code". The response, signed by the head of ING's customer ombudsman service, stated that the bank had no responsibility.

The couple then turned to Facua Galicia, who reached out to the Bank of Spain. The consumer association filed a complaint based on Article 43 of Royal Decree-Law 19/2018 concerning payment services and other urgent measures from 23 November, according to which "the payment service user will obtain rectification by the payment service provider of an unauthorised or incorrectly executed payment transaction only if the payment service user informs it without undue delay". The organisation also based the complaint on Article 44.1 of Royal Decree-Law 19/2018 from 23 November, which states that if the user denies authorisation, it is up to the payment service provider to "prove that the payment transaction was authenticated, accurately recorded and accounted for, and that it was not affected by a technical failure or other deficiency in the service provided by the payment service provider".

Finally, "after analysing the facts", ING informed that it had decided to reimburse the customer the 3,990 euros she had been claiming since the theft the previous year.