Tue, 08 Jul 2025

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 Monzo gave accounts to customers faking PM and King's addresses

The digital bank has been fined £21m by the City regulator for anti-fraud failures.
Monzo, a digital bank, has been fined £21m by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) after failing to verify customers' addresses and allowing people to open accounts using implausible locations such as 10 Downing Street and Buckingham Palace. The FCA's investigation found that Monzo took on customers with PO boxes or foreign addresses with UK postcodes, and even accepted applications from its own premises. This lack of address verification meant the bank didn't spot risky customers based outside the UK, illustrating "how lacking Monzo's financial crime controls were". The regulator said this was one of several areas where Monzo failed to mitigate the risk of financial crime, despite rapid growth in customer numbers. Since 2018, Monzo's customer base increased from around 600,000 to over 5.8 million in 2022.
  >>