Fooled by an email scammer, the bank manager got her job back

Kylie Smith had been promoted from customer service officer to branch manager at the Bank of Queensland in Nambour. In the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic the branch was busy and short of staff, it had no lender, and she was about to go on leave. She was asked to finish a kind of loan she had never handled: a builder's final $37,500 construction payment.

On 1 April 2020, emails in the customer's email chain asked her to hold the payment because he was 'missing on some payments', and then to pay it into a Commonwealth Bank account instead. They came from a fraudster. She wrote the new account details onto a form the customer had signed in 2018, had a colleague who had not prepared the form sign as its 'preparer', authorised the payment herself, and did not phone the customer. The bank lost about $30,000. It dismissed her on 8 May 2020.

Deputy President Asbury found that she had missed red flags and come 'close to crossing the line between carelessness and negligence', but had not crossed it. Her failure to follow procedure was not wilful. She had not been trained for this kind of fraud, the fake emails were not strikingly odd and their hidden technical tells were apparent only in hindsight, the branch was under real pressure, and the bank had contributed: the pre-signed form should never have existed. Her remorse was genuine. Dismissal was not a sound response, so there was no valid reason for it.

Nor was she told the real reason, her manager's loss of trust in her, so she could not answer it. In a separate decision on 19 April 2021, the Deputy President ordered the bank to reinstate her as Nambour branch manager and to pay her lost wages of $48,282.83 plus $6,200.36 in superannuation. Meanwhile she had retrained, and was working in aged care on $23.09 an hour.