Notification, Blocking and Investigation — the First Steps
If funds have left the account without your consent, or a payment was executed incorrectly, timing plays the decisive role. The law requires the consumer to notify the provider — the bank or payment-service provider with which you have the relationship — without unjustified delay upon discovering an unauthorized or incorrectly executed operation. Fix the notification in a form that can later serve as proof: correspondence recorded in the application, an official chat, or a written statement at a branch.
The blocking mechanism works in parallel: the payment-service provider has the right to block a payment instrument on an objectively justified ground — including where there are grounds to suspect fraudulent or unauthorized use of the instrument — and in doing so it must notify the payer, indicating the reason, where possible before the blocking but no later than at the moment of blocking. You may request the blocking of your card or instrument through exactly this mechanism; and once the grounds for blocking are eliminated, the provider must unblock it or replace it with a new one without unjustified delay.
At the consumer’s request, the provider must take immediate measures to trace the operation and communicate the result to the consumer, and it performs these actions free of charge — except where a foreign payment or messaging system participates in the operation and the non-execution or incorrect execution was caused by the consumer; in that case the commission charged must be reasonable.
The allocation of the burden of proof also matters: where the consumer claims that a payment operation is unauthorized or incorrectly executed, the provider bears the burden of establishing that the operation was authenticated, correctly executed, recorded and posted to the accounts, and that no technical malfunction or other defect of the provider’s service affected it. A record of the use of the instrument is not in every case sufficient proof — particularly where the instrument did not physically participate in the operation. Contract terms that increase the consumer’s burden of proof or reduce the provider’s are void.