A Sussex businessman had £14,244 drained from his Metro Bank account after fraudsters used his stolen card details to repeatedly purchase credits for Anthropic’s Claude chatbot. Metro Bank flagged and texted him about the first suspicious £90.90 transaction on 19 June 2026, but let dozens more charges of £90–£200 through before freezing the card the next day. Anthropic said it found no evidence its own systems were compromised and refunded the victim directly, while Metro Bank paid £300 in compensation. The $18,090 cost figure below is an approximate USD conversion of the £14,244 loss.