We have a customer who has reported fraud with her debit card. The fraud involved two girls that she knew. She notified us timely but asked us to wait until she spoke with the police and confronted the girls. She was uncertain if she wanted to press charges, so we told her to let us know promptly as we had a time line to follow. She contacted us that both girls were going to pay her back, so we thought case closed. Now she is saying one of them is going to back out and not pay. Ten days have passed for provisional credit as she had told us they were going to pay her back. My question is where do we stand on this issue. Should we have given her provisional credit to begin with even though she wanted us to wait? This situation was so confusing. Thanks for any information.

When she asked you to wait, she's trying to play both sides of this: "I have an error, but I don't want you to take it over." My question/statement would have been "are you reporting this or not? If so, we're going to capture the debit card to stop future transactions and we're going to go after them. Once you turn it over to us, you're not pressing charges. We are."

If she decided she didn't want to pursue this at the time of initial reporting, it would have been best to document what happened and how she wasn't pursuing it as an error reported to the bank. I would have had her sign it too. Unfortunately, the technical answer is you have to comply with Reg E. I don't think you can not comply with a federal requirement because she told you to wait.

So what do you do now? Document what happened, issue provisional credit and treat it like any other error resolution. The good news is you know who the suspects are. Go after them.

Truthfully, I might tell her to go jump in a lake and take a Reg E violation if it's ever discovered by an examiner - but I'm not advising you to do that.