A Black Met Police officer has won a discrimination claim after hackers hijacked her WhatsApp account, leading to her promotion being blocked.
A black female police officer whose promotion was rescinded after she fell victim to a WhatsApp hacker has won a claim for indirect race discrimination against the Metropolitan Police.
Caroline Nku, who worked at Islington Police Station and is originally from Cameroon, had her WhatsApp account compromised in September 2023 just weeks before she was due to begin a new role as a Police Sergeant.
Fraudsters used her account to message colleagues asking for money, with one message reading: “Please I need a favor from you [praying hand emoji]”. When one officer refused to transfer funds, the hacker replied, “You are too stingy”.
Despite Ms Nku warning her contacts and obtaining a new phone number to stop the hacker, the Met Police launched a gross misconduct investigation into her, suspecting her of fraud.
Consequently, the Human Resources department immediately withdrew her impending promotion. Justifying the move, an internal email from an acting police sergeant stated bluntly: “Officer’s can’t be promoted if they are under investigation”.
The Watford Employment Tribunal has now ruled that this “blanket” policy amounted to indirect race discrimination. Relying on undisputed findings from the Casey Review, which highlighted that black officers are 81% more likely to be placed into the misconduct system than their white counterparts, the tribunal found the Met’s default rule put black officers at a “particular disadvantage”.
The judgment noted that by automatically pausing promotions without an “individualised and evidence-based assessment”, the force was directly transferring severe systemic racial disadvantage into career progression.
The tribunal highlighted a series of serious procedural and evidential failings by the force. During the internal investigation, a Met inspector submitted an intelligence report based on “brief research” which incorrectly claimed WhatsApp’s encryption prevented accounts from being accessed on different devices. The tribunal found this “flawed” assumption was accepted without scrutiny and repeated throughout the chain of command.
Another investigating officer quietly corrected the scammer’s American spelling of “favor” to the British “favour” in an official summary without notifying superiors, and ignored witness statements from colleagues who stated they believed Ms Nku was a victim.
A fellow officer, Detective Inspector Iqbal Meah, attempted to intervene on Ms Nku’s behalf, explicitly warning superiors: “Non-compliance with the Promotion SOP adversely impacts Black, Asian and minority officers as they are more likely to [be] subject to Misconduct Investigations”.
The investigation was eventually halted months later after Deputy Assistant Commissioner Stuart Cundy intervened and reviewed the evidence. He acknowledged the “disproportionality within the police misconduct system” and concluded that “inadequate information… appears to have driven the sequence of events”.
Ms Nku was officially cleared with “no case to answer” and subsequently posted to her role as Sergeant with back pay.
The tribunal dismissed Ms Nku’s separate claims of direct race and sex discrimination. It found the force’s actions were driven by “erroneous assumptions, inadequate fact-finding, and the operation of a blanket or default approach,” rather than conscious or unconscious bias against her as an individual. The amount of compensation Ms Nku will be entitle to is to be determined at another meeting at a later date.
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