Santiago Court rules in favour of customer victim of banking fraud and rejects bank's claim
The Court of Appeals of Santiago overturned the first-instance ruling and dismissed a bank's claim against a customer who authorised fraudulent operations. The court determined that the bank's monitoring system failed to activate the corresponding alerts.
Court overturns conviction of banking customer and points to monitoring system failures
The Court of Appeals of Santiago rejected a claim filed by a bank against one of its customers, who fell victim to fraud that included transfers to a foundation and unauthorised tax payments. According to veredictum.cl, the Fifth Chamber of the appellate court overturned the first-instance sentence, which had sided with the financial institution, and ruled out that the woman had incurred gross negligence.
The ruling, identified under case number 305-2024, was signed by judges Alejandro Rivera and Pedro Maldonado, along with legal advisor Jorge Gómez. The resolution was published on 26 October 2026 by the website of Chile's Judicial Power.
The standard of proof as the crux of the ruling
The core of the litigation centred on determining whether the customer had acted with negligence of sufficient magnitude to shift responsibility for the fraudulent operations she had authorised. The bank based its claim on gross negligence on the part of the defendant, invoking the framework of Law 20.009.
The Court did not find this to be the case. The tribunal was explicit in stating that the evidence gathered by the claimant did not meet the standard of proof required to establish that responsibility. In its considerations, the Fifth Chamber stated that "it has not been possible to reach the conviction that the defendant acted with gross negligence to facilitate the fraudulent operation".
To prove gross negligence in this context, the court required multiple, serious, precise, connected and consistent elements. The evidence presented by the bank did not satisfy this requirement.
Operation outside the customer's usual pattern
The reasoning of the ruling also pointed to the characteristics of the transaction in question. According to the court, the operation "had particularities that did not allow it to be considered, by its amount, as a habitual transaction for the customer". That circumstance, according to the text of the resolution, necessitated different behaviour on the part of the bank.
With this, the Court shifted the focus of the analysis: rather than concentrating exclusively on the customer's conduct, it also examined whether the financial institution had internal control mechanisms and whether these functioned at the time they should have.
The alerts that were not activated
One of the central passages of the resolution concerns the bank's monitoring systems. The Fifth Chamber held that, given the particularities of the transaction, "the bank's monitoring system alerts should have been activated". The ruling adds that such alerts did not function, relying on a specific piece of evidence from the case file: "which, as indicated in the document on pages 86, did not operate".
That reasoning is relevant to litigation regarding banking fraud under Law 20.009: the Court incorporated the functioning of the entity's monitoring system into the analysis based on a specific document from the case file, without extending its conclusions to situations other than those examined in this case.
Complete reversal from first instance
The outcome represents a total reversal from what was decided at the lower court level, where the bank's action had succeeded. With the Fifth Chamber's decision, the customer is absolved of responsibility for the fraudulent operations, as the gross negligence that the financial institution had attributed to her was not proven.
The sentence frames the entire discussion within Law 20.009 and concludes that the necessary prerequisites for attributing the consequences of the fraud to the defendant were not proven with the means available in the case file.
Source: Judicial Power of Chile.
Source: Google News CL — Santiago