29 September 2026 · Mule collection and threshold consolidation
£576 million, and most of it gone in a day
UK Finance reported in June that authorised push payment fraud losses reached £576.4m in 2025 across 248,070 cases, a rise of 19% on the year.
The number that matters operationally is not the total. It is the speed. Proceeds arrive in a receiving account and are moved onward within hours, usually the same day, into further accounts and then out of the visible banking system. By the time a victim has realised, reported it to their own bank, and that bank has contacted the receiving bank, the money has typically moved twice.
That is why mule detection is a receiving-side problem. The victim's bank sees a payment their customer authorised. The receiving bank sees the only thing that looks wrong: an account behaving in a way its own history does not support.
The pattern
This is mule collection and threshold consolidation: fraud proceeds gathered from unconnected remitters into an account with a plausible cover, then consolidated outward in amounts set below reporting thresholds.
A personal account receives eleven payments from unrelated people in four days. Which additional fact would most strengthen a suspicion that it is a receiving account?
One tap. The answer appears straight away.