German court finds bank liable for sophisticated phishing loss — PSD2/IP-analytics obligations clarified

On 2026-04-22 the Landgericht Berlin II (Civil Chamber 38, case 38 O 293/25; not yet final pending appeal) ordered Deutsche Apotheker- und Ärztebank (Apobank) to reimburse €218,000+ in losses from a sophisticated phishing attack that combined forged physical bank letters, manipulated online banking interfaces, and spoofed-number phone calls (heise online, 2026-05-08 · ilex Rechtsanwälte — case summary, 2026-05). The court rejected gross-negligence defences, finding the fraud was too sophisticated to attribute to customer failure. Critically, the ruling found the bank's fraud-detection systems failed to act on a clear anomaly visible in bank-side logs: the new device registration and first login originated from materially different IP addresses and ISPs. The court treated this as an obligation under Germany's PSD2 implementation — specifically, a duty to apply IP-based behavioural analytics and trigger a strong-customer-authentication challenge when registration and first-use IPs diverge. For EU/Swiss financial-sector and public-sector digital-service providers: this reinforces the trend of courts placing authentication-failure liability on service providers when fraud signals are present in server-side telemetry but not acted on.