Tesco Bank Blocks Some Cards After Customer Complaints on Fraud

(Bloomberg) -- Tesco Bank, the lending arm of the U.K. grocery chain, blocked some of its customers' cards after receiving complaints of as much as 600 pounds ($750) being taken from accounts fraudulently.

Fraud prevention systems identified suspicious activity on Saturday, the bank said. As a precautionary measure it blocked some customer cards and sent text messages to notify those affected.

“We have taken steps to protect a small proportion of customers' current accounts from fraud following an alert yesterday,” Tesco Bank said. “All our customers can continue to access their account as normal through online banking and can make chip and pin transactions. For those impacted, we are working to re-establish a full banking service.”

Customers have complained on the bank's website of seeing amounts varying from 20 pounds to 600 pounds missing from their accounts. Tesco Bank, which has more than 7 million customer accounts in total across a range of products, declined to comment on the specific amounts affected, saying that the number of those targeted was more than 1,000 and less than 10,000.

To contact the reporter on this story: Rupert Rowling in London at rrowling@bloomberg.net. To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alaric Nightingale at anightingal1@bloomberg.net, Andras Gergely, Nicholas Larkin