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On Saturday morning, a rumour began spreading around the Tamil community in West London, circulating via WhatsApp. “Urgent,” began one typical example, broadcast through local groups on the Facebook-owned messaging service. “Guys if anyone has metro bank account with money or locker. You need to empty as soon as possible. The bank is facing lot of financial difficulties and may be shut down down or going bankrupt.”

By 16:00, there were queues of panicked people at five or six branches of the challenger bank, which has 67 locations across London and the South East.


Customers fearful of a Northern Rock-style collapse rushed to move money out of their accounts, or empty their safe deposit boxes. One photo on Twitter shows a crowd of people waiting in line at the Metro Bank in Harrow. The company’s share price tumbled nine per cent when the markets opened on Monday morning.

But the rumours weren’t true. Metro Bank isn’t shutting down – and people’s money is unlikely to be at risk. Instead, the incident appears to be one of the most prominent cases of 'fake news' spreading on WhatsApp in the UK.

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“We’re aware there were increased queries in some stores about safe deposit boxes following false rumours about Metro Bank on social media and messaging apps,” a Metro Bank spokesperson says. “There is no truth to these rumours and we want to reassure our customers that there is no reason to be concerned." They added the bank is profitable but have not commented on how much was removed as a result of the messages.

Rumours like these spreading via social media and messaging apps are relatively rare in the UK, but are becoming a critical issue worldwide. Since 2017, reports state that more than 30 people have been killed in India based on false rumours spreading on WhatsApp, and the spread of fake news has been a feature of election campaigns in Brazil and other countries.


Because messages are end-to-end encrypted, WhatsApp doesn't have access to the content of messages being shared through its service. The app has more than 1.5 billion monthly users around the world. But the encryption means it can’t block users in the way that Facebook or Twitter might be able to in the same scenario and has no straightforward way to flag up misleading content as other platforms have started to do.

The bank has not said if it is investigating the issue to determine the source of the claims. It is unclear where the rumours about Metro Bank originated from, who they were started by, or how many people saw them. A lack of publicly available data makes it impossible to determine how problematic the issue was.

The forward message function on WhatsApp allows people to quickly send messages to groups, family members and friends. It has previously been blamed for allowing inaccurate news or messages to rapidly spread through the app's users. At the start of this year, WhatsApp started limiting the ability to forward messages to just five people at once, and tweaked the design to make it clearer when messages have been forwarded from someone else.

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WhatsApp did not respond to a request for comment for this story. However, it has previously said it is deleting two million accounts per month in a bid to stop false information from being spread.

Outside of Facebook, little is known about how messages move around communities on WhatsApp. The company has invested $1m in 20 different research groups studying the different ways that misinformation spreads among its users. At the University of Strathclyde, Narisong Huhe and Mark Shephard are trying to model how information is shared among small communities. "With such data, we then can tell how people’s attitudes and behaviors change in accordance with their social networks," said last year.

The app may have allowed the hoax to spread around Metro bank customers, but there are a number of factors that helped create this short-lived storm. First, Metro Bank makes an unusually high proportion of its money from safe deposit boxes, a service not advertised by most other high-street banks. In 2017, the bank said that security boxes covered 80 per cent of the rent at branches that had been open for more than a year. They are particularly popular in west London, where there’s a high concentration of people of south Asian descent, who often use safe deposit boxes to store gold and jewellery passed down through generations.

Cash deposits up to £85,000 in bank accounts are protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, but some versions of the rumour said that people had until the end of Saturday to claim their safe-deposit box belongings. This was, of course, false – and the Metro Bank social media team has been busy on Twitter replying to concerned tweets.

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The rumour may have been sparked by a couple of recent news stories, which have been twisted and conflated in the social media echo chamber. In January, financial regulator the PRI raised concerns about accountancy errors in reports the bank was submitting. Metro Bank had miscalculated how much capital it needed to back up its commercial lending operations, leaving it with a funding hole to plug.

It is currently in the process of a £350 million capital raise, which it says not to plug a funding shortfall, but to help pay for the construction of new branches. It’s one of the few high-street banks that’s actually opening new locations, and gained 97,000 new customers over the first quarter of this year according to its most recent results.

Pinpointing the exact spark that caused people to flock to the bank is difficult. On May 1, the Financial Times reported that Metro Bank had seen a four per cent drop in deposits in the aftermath of the accountancy error news. By May 3 rumours about Metro Bank had started circulating on Twitter – it’s possible that these were picked up on Tamil language groups and shared more widely by people concerned about their belongings being seized from safe deposit boxes.

Last Thursday, two days before the rumours started to spread on social media, hedge funds made large bets against Metro Bank, short-selling 12.5 per cent of its shares to make it the most shorted UK stock. On Twitter, some are convinced that the photos of queues at Metro Bank branches are actually old pictures from old openings – although the company tends to open its new locations with more eye-catching entertainment than a crowd of concerned looking customers.

The rumours have died down, and the conversations on WhatsApp have moved on to other things. Pictures on social media show empty branches – a return to normality. Metro Bank isn’t on the verge of imminent collapse, and the worried people queuing at branches in West London lost no money, only time.

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