A man who says he narrowly avoided being defrauded of more than £6,000 after receiving false bank details from a hacked email account has taken to social media following “failed” efforts to raise the alarm.

James Bromley turned to Twitter to report that he had received an email claiming to be from his builder including details of a new bank account along with a request to pay an outstanding £6,369.72 into the account.

Mr Bromley said he had seen his builder only hours previously, so the content of the email made sense, but the grammar used in it raised his concern.

He phoned his builder, who said the request was not from him and he was not aware his email had been hacked.

Mr Bromley posted a string of tweets detailing his attempts to report the crime to authorities and raise an alarm to prevent anyone else transferring money to the account.

He initially tried the website and helpline for ActionFraud, the UK’s national fraud and cyber crime reporting centre, which advised him to report the incident using its online reporting tool.

He then called his own bank which, he said, advised that it did not have access to any central reporting function to alert other banks that accounts were being fraudulently used.

Refusing to give up, Mr Bromley said he phoned the police on 101 and was told to call ActionFraud.

Mr Bromley tweeted: “I’m an experienced savvy user, I nearly fell for this. I’m astonished to learn that the UK fraud teams or banks have no system or body that will act to hold bank accounts being used for fraud to prevent others from being caught. This is wrong. We are easy targets.

“Right now, victims could be transferring money into that account, it’ll be cleaned out before anyone acts on my information. I’ve failed to protect anyone else. UK is a brilliantly easy target, we don’t act on a live crime when it requires minimal effort.”

An ActionFraud spokeswoman said: “In situations where people believe they have been sent a phishing email but have not responded to it or sent any money, they should report it to ActionFraud as a phishing attempt. This can be done at http://actionfraud.police.uk/report_phishing

“These attempted phishing reports are taken as information reports. An information report can be made where there may not have been a fraud committed, but there is suspicion of criminal intent.

“Phishing reports are then fed into our ActionFraud team. If we see a large number of reports with consistent traits, such as the same email addresses or company involved, we will then issue an alert as soon as possible. These alerts go to other police forces, neighbourhood watch groups and the media.”