TL;DR

Zoli Rutter, who runs a business in Sussex, lost £14,244 from his Metro Bank account to fraudsters buying Claude credits on his card. The bank spotted the first suspicious payment of £90.90 on 19 June and texted to ask if he had authorised it. He said no. It blocked that single transaction, not the card, and further payments ranging from £90 to £200 kept clearing for another day.

The failure here is procedural rather than technological, and that is what makes it instructive.

Rutter had been paying roughly £15 a month for the chatbot, using it to work through business invoices. The debit card he held on file with Anthropic became the instrument for an organised group buying platform credit. Metro Bank followed up by text promising to freeze the account; in practice only that one payment was stopped. By the time the card was fully blocked the following day, more than £14,000 had gone.

Metro Bank pointed to how intricate the fraud was in explaining why some payments cleared before the block took effect, said it recognised how distressing the episode had been, and refunded Rutter while pursuing a chargeback against Anthropic. It has since told him he did not receive the standard of service it expects to provide and offered £300 in compensation. He intends to complain to the Financial Ombudsman anyway. Metro says the delay in blocking cards has now been fixed.

Anthropic says a coordinated gang ran his cards through its checkout, that it has found no evidence the details came from its own systems, and that the account behind the purchases has been banned. It has refunded him directly, so Metro Bank’s interim payment will be reclaimed. Anyone charged fraudulently should contact its support channel for a refund.

This is not the first such case: a US Claude user described gift cards bought with his details in May, with similar accounts appearing on Reddit. It also lands in an uncomfortable week for the company, which was named by the FCA last week as providing Claude access to firms in its advanced AI testing initiative, and which was reported days ago to have had user conversations publicly visible online.

The broader lesson for UK businesses is about the payment rails rather than the AI. Any subscription platform that sells prepaid credit is an attractive laundering route, and a card on file at a fast-moving AI vendor is now a fraud surface worth reviewing.

Looking Forward

The FCA expects money lost to unauthorised card fraud to be back in the customer’s account within one working day. Whether the Ombudsman treats a partial block as meeting that standard is the question this case will settle.