Issues ›

Unauthorised transaction

Payments the customer says they did not authorise at all, including card and account takeover.

Rules the ombudsman applied

Derived from the rules actually cited in these decisions, ranked by how often they appear — not from an editorial view of which rules matter.

Which firms lose on this

Firms with fewer than 20 decisions on this issue are excluded — the rate would not mean anything.

In the ombudsman’s words

Mr S is unhappy that Barclays Bank Plc has allowed a company to take money from his account.

without her authority, Barclays Bank PLC cancelled a direct debit

Mr M complains that Secret Eye Limited, trading as The Finance Facility, has taken money from his bank account without his authorisation.

He complains that Barclays Bank Plc sent money from his late mother’s account without suitable authority.

Quotes are shown only where the exact wording was verified against the decision text.

The US counterpart

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) runs a separate complaint database for American consumers. We map its issue labels onto this issue ourselves — the CFPB does not — and the two datasets are not comparable: UK figures above are ombudsman decisions with an adjudicated outcome, while these are complaints made to a US regulator, most of which are never adjudicated. A count of one is not a count of the other, so no rate, percentage or ratio is calculated between them.

The CFPB recorded 7,485 complaints mapped to this issue, received between February 2024 and October 2026, across all US consumer financial products.

Source: CFPB Consumer Complaint Database, not scoped to banking — the CFPB’s complaint categories span all consumer financial products, not just banking.