“The View from Below”: Consumer Resistance in Authorised Push Payment Fraud

• In Event: Critical Perspectives on Victims and Perpetrators

Abstract

Regulatory discourses on Authorised Push Payment Fraud (“APPF”), through which a victim is deceived into authorising fund transfers to a fraudster, often converged on normative questions of victim negligence and liability. These norms were typically deployed by financial institutions to deny redress for victims, and to resist scrutiny of systemic weaknesses in fraud prevention and enforcement.

The UK’s recent establishment of a new mandatory compensation scheme for APPF victims, to be funded by financial institutions, marked a perceptive change in the normative evaluation of fraud liability. This paper traces the emergence of APPF in the UK within a broader socio-economic arc, which promoted values of market rationality and individual liability influential in shaping regulatory responses to APPF: acceleration of payment speed due to competitive pressures in e-commerce, and the devolution of crime control from state to non-state actors under the “responsibilisation” agenda.

Mobilising critical theory and Habermasian discourse analysis, this paper evaluates the dominance of these values in the speech acts from institutional actors “above”, contrasted with victims’ retelling of experiences “below”. It is contended that the potential for normative change could be found in the personal accounts of fraud victimhood, which resisted systematic abstraction by centring painful accounts of loss, institutional indifference, and a recognition of shared precarity and mutual interdependence upon which social life depends.

Author

• Jane Ngan, University of Manchester