ING Belgium must appear before the criminal court because one of its accounts was allegedly used to commit a fraud, the newspaper L’Echo reported on Saturday. This is the first time that a bank has been sued for a fraud of this type.
On Wednesday morning, ING Belgium was summoned to appear before the criminal court of first instance by a man from Knokke. In 2014, he had paid a sum of 261,500 euros into an ING account. A major part of this amount (211,500 euros) would have been quickly transferred to a British account of the Worldpay payment service. What happened to the balance (50,000 euros) has still not been clarified.
“The man had transferred a quarter of a million euros to the ING account following a telephone call from a person speaking French who offered to invest in very risky “binary options”. wouldn’t have been suspicious because ordinary bank accounts, such as those available at ING, were used regularly to make investments”, can we read in L’Echo.
The man would nevertheless have called ING Brussels to ensure the validity of the account in question. By the end of 2014, the Knokkois had understood that he had been the victim of a scam following having tried in vain to pocket his profit. He had therefore filed a complaint with the federal judicial police in Bruges.
But the authors of the scam having never been found, the file was closed on the legal level as on the side of ING. After having tried once more without success, last year, to find an amicable arrangement with the bank, the victim of the scam is now taking ING Belgium to court, accusing it of having breached its legal obligations in terms of of combating money laundering.
Since then, it has been known that the anti-money laundering measures implemented at the time by ING Belgium were insufficient, which led to the National Bank conducting an audit.
