Part of the collections and valuables cluster. This is the cover behind the personal fraud and cybersecurity service on our homepage, and it is the one most households discover they do not have at the worst moment.
Household insurance is built around physical loss. Something is stolen, burnt or broken, and the policy replaces it. Money moved out of a bank account by a person who was deceived into moving it is none of those things, and the standard Portuguese multirriscos wording has nothing to say about it.
That gap has become the most consequential one in personal insurance, because the losses in this class dwarf the value of what is usually stolen from a house.
Payment diversion, and why property buyers are the target
The dominant fraud against internationally mobile households in Portugal is simple. An email exchange about a payment — a deposit, completion funds, a builder’s stage payment — is intercepted or convincingly imitated. Shortly before the transfer, the payer receives updated bank details, plausibly explained and apparently from the right person. The money goes, and within minutes it has been moved on.
Property purchases attract this because the ingredients are all present: large sums, a known timetable, parties in different countries who have often never met, correspondence conducted entirely by email, and a buyer who is used to receiving instructions from a lawyer or agent they are trusting at a distance.
Nothing is hacked in the sense people imagine. An email arrives from the right name, at the right moment, saying the account has changed.
The defence is procedural, not technical: verify any change of bank details by voice, on a number you already held, before transferring anything, and treat urgency in a payment email as the warning sign rather than the reason to hurry. That single habit prevents most of these losses. Cover exists for when it does not.
What personal fraud and cyber cover actually responds to
| Exposure | What cover typically provides |
|---|---|
| Payment diversion / social engineering | The funds transferred under deception, within a stated limit, subject to verification conditions |
| Account takeover and unauthorised transfers | Losses not recovered from the bank, plus the cost of restoring accounts |
| Identity theft and impersonation | Costs of correcting records, legal costs, and lost income spent resolving it |
| Extortion | Specialist response consultancy, incident costs, and the demand itself in defined circumstances |
| Device and data restoration | Cleaning, rebuilding and restoring household devices and data after an attack |
| Online purchase fraud | Goods paid for and never delivered, at a modest sub-limit |
| Cyberbullying and reputational harm | Counselling and removal costs on some wordings, usually limited |
Two features matter more than the limits. The first is access to a response service: a number to call that hour, which begins recall attempts, contacts the banks, and preserves evidence. In the first few hours that is worth more than the indemnity. The second is the set of conditions precedent — that a change of payment details was verified by an independent channel, that multi-factor authentication was in place on the accounts, that the loss was notified within a short window. Those conditions are the wording, and they are the reason to read it before buying.
Completing on a property, or transferring funds into Portugal?
Ask us about personal fraud cover before the money moves, not after.
Extortion
Extortion cover responds to a credible demand backed by a threat: household devices or data encrypted with a ransom demand, personal information stolen and threatened with publication, or a threat directed at a person. What it funds, in almost every wording, is first the response — a specialist consultancy that assesses credibility, manages communications and advises on whether and how to respond — and only then, in defined circumstances, the payment.
Conditions are strict and they exist for good reasons: the insurer must be notified before any payment, authorities must be informed, and payments must comply with applicable sanctions rules. A payment made unilaterally before notifying the insurer is generally not recoverable.
Where the bank’s responsibility stops
The distinction that governs everything in this class is between an unauthorised payment and an authorised but deceived one. Where a payment is unauthorised — a card used by someone else, credentials stolen and used to move funds — the bank generally bears the loss under payment services rules, subject to the customer not having been grossly negligent.
Where the account holder made the transfer themselves, having been deceived about the recipient, the position is much weaker, and it varies by jurisdiction and by circumstance. Reimbursement regimes for this kind of fraud have developed unevenly across Europe, and a Portuguese resident transferring funds between accounts in different countries can find themselves outside whichever regime they were relying on. That gap is what the cover is for.
The hours after it happens
Speed determines outcome more than anything else. In order: contact your bank and ask for an immediate recall, giving the exact time and amount; contact the receiving bank if it can be identified; report to the police and keep the reference, since insurers and banks will both require it; change credentials on any account that touched the compromised correspondence; and notify the insurer or the response line straight away. Preserve the emails with their full headers rather than forwarding tidied copies — they are the evidence of how the deception was constructed.
Whether a household needs it
The honest answer is that it is worth most to households doing the things that attract this fraud: buying or building property in Portugal, moving significant sums between countries, managing a renovation with staged payments, employing people domestically, or holding assets in structures with several advisers in the correspondence chain. For a household that transfers nothing unusual, the exposure is real but modest, and the procedural discipline matters more than the policy.
Where a dispute follows a fraud — with a bank, an agent or a professional adviser — the cost of pursuing it is a different question, addressed by personal legal expenses cover.
Adler & Rochefort is a commercial brand of Ownizo, Unipessoal Lda., registered with the Portuguese Insurance and Pension Funds Supervisory Authority (ASF) under no. 425591790/3. General information only, not personalised advice; cover, sub-limits and conditions vary by underwriter and by risk.
More on this subject: The liability a household carries without noticing · Employing domestic staff in Portugal: the insurance you are legally required to have