‘I was tricked out of £69,000 and Wise won’t refund me’

Kathryn Westmore from the Royal United Services Institute, a defence and security think tank, said: “This is exactly the kind of case where a delay in payments might be helpful. When you’re stressed, trying to multitask or worried about something, it can become very difficult to see the wood from the trees. I think Wise should have been aware that there was something wrong with these transactions. The flow of funds is just too unusual for them not to be picked up by any decent transaction monitoring system.”