MSE News: Santander refuses to refund pensioner tricked out of £40,000 life savings

colsten

ceredigion wrote: »

The lady on Money Box was feeding in the OTP to setup new payee when she was asked to by the fraudsters. Then blames the bank.


About 1:44 in
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b087p2k4

The story as she told it doesn't make sense. There must be more to it.
And who keeps £180,000 in a single bank?!?

p00hsticks wrote: »

Having lsitened to this program at the time, I think it was suggested that there should be a delay of a few days between setting up a new payee and being able to transfer large amounts of money across to them.

This seems a sensible step towards preventing such frauds. Although I hope I'd never get caught out by such a scam, online hacking seems to be more and more prevalent and it does frighten me how quickly accounts can currently be drained of very large amounts of money online.

It's like saying I can only buy 2 bottles of wine at a time as some alcoholics drink 4 bottles at a time.

Hundreds of thousands of customers would be inconvenienced for the sake of - perhaps - protecting a handful of careless people from getting scammed. In any event, determined fraudsters would find a workaround.

jamesd

Santander does appear not to have handled aspects of this well. Notice that bit about them remaining suspicious but the customer wanting to speak with the scammer? The payment time obligation is next business day, not immediately, so they could have delayed the transactions and met both their processing time and security obligations. For the later transactions that is what I suggest the customer complains about.

Banks are to show payee details for an account later this year. If text alerts include this information it may help to make this sort of thing as well as typo errors resulting in wrong payees less likely.

mt99

I agree with all of the above but with one proviso - I think if someone is tricked to sending money to another account which has been opened with fraudulent details than the receiving bank should be responsible. yes I know it is easy to obtain fraudulent documents these days and in some ways the bank opening the account for the fradster can be tricked but nevertheless it would concentrate their minds wonderfully and perhaps stop them opening fraudulent bank accounts for con artists quite so easily. Barclays seems to be the worst offender...

alanq

It is not just the vulnerable that fall for these scams with a few thousand £s lost. If banks start being held reponsible few of us will be able to afford the charges banks would charge for running accounts.

http://metro.co.uk/2015/09/21/uk-company-hand-1million-to-fraud-caller-after-being-hit-with-biggest-single-phone-scam-5400914/

http://www.legalcheek.com/2015/10/solicitor-tricked-into-transferring-734k-of-client-money-to-phone-scammers/

Cornucopia

Thanks for posting those - it puts a completely different slant on it when professional people are being duped over such huge sums of money.

We need to get over the logic that Bank liability = higher Bank charges, and move on to Bank liability = Bank due diligence.

redux

p00hsticks wrote: »

Having lsitened to this program at the time, I think it was suggested that there should be a delay of a few days between setting up a new payee and being able to transfer large amounts of money across to them.

This seems a sensible step towards preventing such frauds. Although I hope I'd never get caught out by such a scam, online hacking seems to be more and more prevalent and it does frighten me how quickly accounts can currently be drained of very large amounts of money online.

In my experience (though a different bank) there is.

About a year ago I set up to transfer some money from a fairly new bank account to another, also in my name.

I did a modest amount to start with, in case of problems and just to check, and received the phone call with a one off code and entered this on the web page.

That was ok, so I tried just under £3000. Blocked. I phoned the bank and was transferred to the fraud unit, who after some security questions and my descriptions of what I was doing cleared the transfer.

A few months later I did similar while helping a family member who hardly does internet, to transfer some to her own new account I'd persuaded her to open for a bit more interest. £5 transfer. Phone call, code, cleared. Try £4995. Blocked. Phoned the fraud unit. Handed the phone across. She failed the security questions. Do you have any other accounts with us? No. This was wrong, as the old Cash ISA she had asked to be closed was still sat there with a zero balance. So we had to go into the bank with identity documents (for a 50+ year old account). The staff member phoned the fraud unit and had no priority, so 20 minutes on hold, waving people behind us to go to another counter.

Then they had to be convinced, by asking her 3 or 4 times, was she sure she wanted to do this transfer, there wasn't another person asking her to pay this to them, etc. No, it's another account in my own name, no, no problem, etc.

So there are what should be adequate obstacles, perhaps even to the effect of convincing some customers it's too much rigmarole to spread their cash across a few accounts for a bit more interest (though ironically such a spread would also increase security against a large fraud on one account).

Cornucopia

Sorry you had that hassle, but all it really shows is that an ad-hoc, badly designed and non-industry standard approach doesn't work.

Certainly there should be a difference between transferring money between one's own accounts within the same Bank, and transferring money out to a new payee that is not on the Bank's pre-existing list of Utility Companies, etc.

It needs proper thought so as to be effective but also not an undue barrier to getting things done.

teddysmum

How many 'not my fault' actions are there, nowadays? :


I put £2000 into an account because 'my bank' asked me to by email (despite email and website warnings from them, that they won't do this)


I paid the nice man from Nigeria, £10000, as he said it was needed to process the million I've inherited.


I paid £500 process money to claim a huge money prize (regardless of never having entered a competition anyway)


I am a vulnerable £50 year old that no one has loved before, so I gave my 20 year old toy boy £90000, so he could come over and live with me.


My son ran up a £3000 phone bill after playing games on my mobile.


I had debts,so I spent all my savings on Lotto. I didn't win and now have more debt as the bank won't refund my gambling money.


Evil Skynet sent me a huge phone bill, when I have a calls package, just because I spent 3 hours calling my friend in Australia.


How dare Skynet charge me for cancelling a contract , after 6 weeks? I didn't like the programmes and didn't know the T&Cs said there was a charge.


There will always be idiots, so why should the rest of us fund their actions ?

eskbanker

Cornucopia wrote: »

We need to get over the logic that Bank liability = higher Bank charges, and move on to Bank liability = Bank due diligence.

I get the argument that prevention is better than cure but ultimately they both come down to Bank liability = higher costs, and it would be unrealistic to expect them to simply absorb these....

Cornucopia

eskbanker wrote: »

I get the argument that prevention is better than cure but ultimately they both come down to Bank liability = higher costs, and it would be unrealistic to expect them to simply absorb these....

It's just not healthy to be putting £millions into the criminal economy in this way.

Since the Public have been proven fallible, it's time for the only other solution - industry/regulatory action.