Suspicion of fraud in unauthorised payment transactions: reporting to Bank of Italy

Pursuant to Article 11 of Legislative Decree 11/2010 - as amended from time to time and implementing PSD2 in Italy - in case of an unauthorised payment transaction, payment service providers (“PSPs”) must immediately refund the amount of that transaction to the payer. However, in case of a justified suspicion of fraud, PSPs may suspend the refund by informing the Bank of Italy in writing.

In this regard, on 30 October 2023, the Bank of Italy published instructions to be followed by PSPs for this notification. More specifically, it:

• must occur through a specific template to be sent to the Bank of Italy via email at vic@pec.bancaditalia.it;
• must include, among other things, information on the reasons of the suspicion of fraud, the type of payment services user (natural person/consumer; natural person/non-consumer; etc.) and the characteristics of the payment transaction (date and amount of the transaction), without providing data or information of the customer having a personal nature;
• must be made – only where the suspension of a refund has occurred – on the 10^th day of the following month.

Next steps

Both the instructions and the template to be used for the reporting are available in Italian on the Bank of Italy website (link here).

Authored by Jeffrey Greenbaum and Elisabetta Zeppieri.