“The view from below”: Resistance and change in Authorised Push Payment Fraud

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. Recent regulatory changes in the UK, which introduced a new mandatory reimbursement scheme for APPF victims and greater transparency in anti-fraud performance by financial institutions, marked a perceptive shift in the responsibility for fraud prevention and detection. These developments marked the latest flashpoint in the long simmering tension between economic imperatives, technology development and crime control. This study critically retraces the emergence of APPF in the UK within a broader socio-economic arc, during which competitive pressures from online commerce motivated the development of instantaneous payment settlement technology, despite known fraud risks. At the same time, as the state progressively devolved anti-fraud responsibilities to the private sector, an onward liability shift to the individual followed, under the guise of “consumer education”. Through the evaluation of documentary records, parliamentary committee inquiries, victims’ testimonies and interviews conducted by the author, the study highlights the dominance of a new form of rationality anchored on individual responsibility for fraud detection. It mobilises Habermasian discourse ethics to analyse speech acts from institutional actors “above”, and those from victims’ experiences “below”, revealing the contradictions between bureaucratic obfuscation of structural failings and painful accounts of personal loss. It is contended that personal testimonies resisted abstraction, and demanded recognition of shared precarity and mutual interdependence upon which social life depends.