Have you been scammed?

What happens next depends on whether:

• someone accessed and used your banking or cards without your authority to take money from your accounts — called an ‘unauthorised payment’
• you were tricked into paying via a scam — called an ‘authorised payment’.

We’ll ask questions to understand what happened, protect your banking, and work with others to help protect other people from similar scams.

Be open and honest, even if you’re embarrassed or think you made a mistake.

Hiding information or being untruthful may impact your eligibility for compensation.

Under the Code of Banking Practice, we’ll compensate loss from an unauthorised payment if you:

• weren’t dishonest or negligent,
• took reasonable steps to protect your banking, and,
• cooperate with our information requests.

What to expect

Once we have all the information we need to understand what happened, we’ll:

• assess if you’re eligible for compensation,
• let you know within 30 business days if we can compensate you.

Under the Code of Banking Practice, we’ll compensate all or some loss from an authorised payment scam if:

• you’re eligible, and,
• we didn’t meet our scam protection commitments.

How much we compensate depends on whether you took reasonable care.

Eligibility

You’re eligible if:

• you were a consumer,
• the loss related to a domestic payment made after 30 November 2025,
• you weren’t using a third-party payment service,
• you weren’t buying goods or services on social media or an online marketplace,
• you weren’t dishonest or fraudulent,
• you reported the scam to the New Zealand Police and us within three months of discovery (or within twelve months of the last payment),
• you cooperate with our information requests.

We’ll only compensate you for losses three times during our banking relationship, up to a maximum of $500,000. Beyond this, we’ll use our discretion.

What to expect

Once we have all the necessary information, we’ll let you know within 30 business days if we’ll compensate you.

1. We’ll check if you’re eligible — if not, we’ll let you know.
2. If eligible, we’ll check if we met our commitments.
3. If we didn’t meet our commitments, we’ll compensate all or some of your loss depending on whether you took reasonable care.
4. If we did meet our commitments, we’ll ask the bank who received your payment (the receiving bank) if they met their commitments. If they didn’t, they’ll compensate your loss.

We’ll let you know if we’ll only compensate some of your loss because we believe you didn’t take reasonable care when making or deciding to make the payment. For example, if you made the payment despite our warnings.

We can share your information

If we met our commitments, we share information with the receiving bank so they can determine if they met their commitments or not.

If you’re unhappy with our decision, let us know. We’ll work with you to try to find a solution that’s fair and reasonable.

If you’re still unhappy after we’ve tried to resolve things with you, you can ask the Banking Ombudsman to review our decision.

To help protect New Zealanders from scams, the banking community has committed to providing the following commitments.

1. Education warnings
   We will provide specific education warnings to consumers before certain payments are made.
2. Confirmation of payee service
   We will offer a service via some banking channels to check if the name of the person you’re paying matches the account or not, or advise if we can’t check.
3. High-risk transaction identification
   We will identify high-risk transactions and respond appropriately.
4. 24/7 reporting channel
   We will provide a 24/7 reporting channel for customers and respond to reports of a scam within a reasonable timeframe.
5. Information sharing
   We will share information with other banks to help prevent criminal activity and freeze funds where appropriate.