A Metro Bank customer, Sussex businessman Zoli Rutter, is fighting to recover £14,244 taken from his account after fraudsters exploited his linked debit card to buy credits for the Anthropic AI chatbot Claude. Despite Rutter confirming to the bank that an initial suspicious transaction was unauthorised, Metro Bank failed to freeze his account immediately, allowing a series of further fraudulent payments to go through. The case is the latest in a string of incidents where criminals have used stolen financial details to purchase Claude access, raising questions about safeguards at both the bank and Anthropic.

Metro Bank spotted a suspect £90.90 transaction on 19 June and texted Rutter, who confirmed it was not his; the bank blocked only that single payment rather than the account, and further transactions of between £90 and £200 followed before the card was fully frozen the next day. After Guardian Money intervened, Metro Bank temporarily refunded Rutter while pursuing a chargeback claim against Anthropic, which says a coordinated fraud gang used his card details but denies any evidence the breach originated from its own systems. The episode follows similar reports from a US-based Claude user in May and comes amid wider scrutiny of Anthropic, including the FCA's recent decision to grant firms access to Claude and revelations this week that some users' conversations with the chatbot were publicly viewable online.