As Dotti said, the odds of getting your money back are low but you SHOULD go through all the standard steps of reporting the fraud formally to the bank where the fraudster's account is held, and insist on getting their acknowledgement. The same with Action Fraud. Beyond that you can take it up with your MP and report your story here on the 'Watchdog' site.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006mg74I'm a UK citizen and a retired bank employee and the current situation is scandalous. The UK must rank somewhere below Nigeria in banking security and most major global bank frauds are currently laundered through fraudulently opened UK bank accounts, making a laughing stock of the UK government's claim to have the world's most stringent money laundering legislation. It's quite pointless if implementation is lax and enforcement non-existent - and that's the current situation.
CIFAS - the UK financial industry's anti-fraud body have never even mentioned the problem, but then it is run by the banks and it would be a major embarrassment to own up to the ease with which criminals can open bank accounts in the UK.
CIFAS is a not-for-profit membership association representing the private and public sectors. CIFAS is dedicated to the prevention of fraud, including staff fraud, and the identification of financial and related crime.
I discovered one bank account opened in the name of 'you fool' in Romanian and, there appears to be a competition for the most outrageous one used, as I found another in a name I can't even mention here. If UK banks aren't already the laughing stock of the world, amongst the criminal world they certainly are.
The fact that one fraudster was recently reported in the papers to have opened in excess of 750 fraudulent bank accounts used in a major fraud only serves to highlight the scale of the problem that isn't even acknowledged by UK law enforcement. If I sound a little hyper on the subject I have to point out that just opening one fraudulent bank account gives you a marketable commodity in the criminal community. Without actually performing a financial fraud, opening 750 accounts fraudulently makes you close to a millionaire.
The loss to you personally theresa1983 will be a tragedy but it evidences a much greater risk facing UK banks and the economy. You simply can't run a banking system with such a large proportion of fraudulent accounts embedded in it. It is palpably a myth that UK money laundering legislation exists to prevent it.