Lloyds Bank is refusing to compensate a customer who lost £5,200 to an email scam despite the money being transferred to another account at the same bank that a police investigation found had probably been opened fraudulently.

Surrey businesswoman Kate Levers is the latest victim of a fast-growing email scam, where a fraudster hacks into a company’s emails and poses as a legitimate contractor requiring payment, but to a new account.

Levers, the finance director of a refurbishment firm, Demand and Supply, is preparing to take Lloyds to court to reclaim the loss, and plans to remove six business and personal accounts from the bank in protest. She has been a customer for 40 years.

The fraud occurred after she set up a bank transfer which she had been expecting. She then received a second email from the contractor asking her to make the payment to a different account. The second email was not genuine, and the new Lloyds account to which she sent the £5,200 was controlled by fraudsters. Previous victims of this scam have lost significantly larger sums.

Her case highlights the need for everyone to sign up to two-step verification on their email, and never to trust an email that asks for a payment to be made to a different account. It also shows how the receiving banks will deny liability, even if one of their accounts was used to launder the money.

Levers’ case is unusual because, unlike most other email fraud victims who are ignored by the authorities, she managed to persuade the police to investigate. The lead officer in the Metropolitan police’s Falcon (anti-fraud) unit told her that the Lloyds account used to process her firm’s payment had been opened using a cloned identity.

An officer told her in an email: “Genuine details may have been fraudulently used to obtain the ID document used to open the account and I advised Lloyds as such.

“Organised crime networks employ people to enter the UK for very short periods of time, with the sole intention of opening fraudulent accounts. They play no part in, and often have no knowledge of, the fraud itself. The matter is complicated by the fact that false identities and documents are used to open these accounts.”

Levers and her adviser, the fraud recovery specialist, Jack Buster, believe that Lloyds failed to carry out proper checks when the account was opened, and as a result was negligent. The bank denies this.

“Based on the statement issued by Falcon, it probably means that someone went into the branch of Lloyds bank in Broadway, Stratford in east London, with an identity card that was not genuine. It’s absurdly simple but this is how organised crime networks open bank accounts at all UK high street banks. It would have been a similar story with the utility bill which are so easy to fake. Had Lloyds done a thorough check, they would have discovered what the police did, that the details didn’t match. But they didn’t bother, the fraudster tricked the bank, and Kate Levers’ business has lost her money. It is clear the bank should refund her,” Buster says.

The bank rejects what the police told Levers, and said its account opening procedures are robust.

In a statement Lloyds said: “We have a great deal of sympathy for Mrs Levers who has been the victim of a crime. We blocked the account immediately once she reported the fraud which was the day after the payment was made. Unfortunately by this point, no funds remained in the beneficiary account. We have fully investigated this case and all the evidence which indicates this was a scam where a genuine account, operational for a number of years, was unfortunately then used to carry out this fraud.”

MPs hear evidence on online fraud

The frequent ways in which banks refuse to refund the victims of email and other online frauds has been laid bare in evidence presented to a parliamentary investigation.

Richard Emery, an independent expert who helps consumers fight their banks, told the Treasury select committee on Tuesday that the banks are mostly “dismissive and uncaring” - and often deny liability - when a customer is the victim of an email fraud or other similar scam.

Appearing alongside Richard Piggin, from the consumer group Which?, Emery says the banks frequently insist the scam victim was “grossly negligent” and on that basis refuse to refund a customer.

Banks typically rely upon a definition of gross negligence that critics say is wide open to interpretation. They argue that the victim may have been subjected to an incredibly sophisticated scam, which in some cases exploits a weakness in the bank’s online operation.

The banks are supposed to refund any payment that is not “authorised” by the customer, but frequently do not, and instead will revert to the the gross negligence defence.

Emery said all the banks are bad in this regard but named Santander and Metro Bank as the banks who fight hardest against refunding customers who have been the victim of fraud.

Consumers and businesses are currently losing about £300m a year to authorised push payment frauds as they are known, the session was told. There were over 20,000 reported cases in the first half of 2018, according to UK Finance, which tracks bank fraud.

Emery told MPs that all the banks have also allowed the use of so-called “mule” accounts - particularly students accounts - to be used to funnel money stolen in this way. He said accounts that might have had a few pounds in them for a few years were suddenly receiving hundreds of thousands of pounds - and this was going unnoticed by the banks.

He told MPs that he understood that Lloyds Bank alone has identified 13,000 accounts that have been used as mule accounts.

As previously reported by Guardian Money, Emery said the introduction of faster payments had been a huge boon for fraudsters as they have allowed money to be quickly moved around the financial system.

He has called for the banks to offer a 24-hour delay on payments of £500 or more to new beneficiaries, and for the Financial Conduct Authority to set out in black and white what constitutes “gross negligence”. This would encourage the banks to do more to prevent frauds in the first place, he argued.

UK Finance, which represents the banks, says the industry’s fraud protection systems stopped £2 out of every £3 of attempted unauthorised fraud last year.

“Banks will always make every effort to help a customer recover any stolen funds and the industry has introduced new standards on how banks respond to scam victims. We are also working closely with the regulator and consumer groups on a new voluntary code to better protect customers from the threat of authorised push payment scams.”