The Supreme Court condemned the bank to return 172,000 euros that the client defrauded when withdrawing the pension of a deceased relative

He Supreme Court condemned Bank Unicaja re-establish Social security EUR 172,077.05 defrauded by a client who debited the entity’s account for more than 18 years pension deceased relative. In a ruling dated March 3, the high court dismissed an appeal filed by the financial institution against a ruling by the Supreme Court of Justice of Andalusia, which had already ordered the bank to reimburse the amounts improperly received by its client.

The author fraud He was the stepson of a pensioner who, when he died in June 1999 (at only 43 years of age), did not notify the National Institute of Social Security of his death, so this body continued to pay the benefit, directly debited to his account on a monthly basis in Caja de Ahorros de Ronda (an entity later absorbed by Unicaja). Almost eleven years later, in the summer of 2010, a relative who was receiving a pension and who already had a criminal record went to prison, so for several months no one withdrew money from the account that was blocked by the financial entity in 2015, since the holder was not submitted by DNI. That was the case until almost two years later, when the person went to the branch, filled out the client’s file and gave an identity card that would later be found to be fake. But until then, having received a business card and pin, he was able to withdraw all the money accumulated during the time when the account was frozen. For this reason, when four months later an employee of the bank branch raised the alarm about the falsity of the DNI, the amount that was defrauded to the social security was already 172,077.05 euros.

Since the fraudster was declared unable to pay in the first instance, first the Andalusian High Court, and now the Supreme Court, condemned the financial institution to return the improperly paid amount, as a subsidiary civil liability. As the bank has already returned more than 42,800 euros, which corresponds to the last four years of pension, it will now have to enter another 129,209, which the entity considered to correspond to the already prescribed years. However, the judges explain that, as it is a criminal offense of prolonged fraud, the statute of limitations begins to run from the date of the last criminal offense, which is why they reject the appeal and confirm the previous sentence.