Advice for someone involved in a banking scam

EachPenny

FriendlyFoe wrote: »

Which bank and where were the payments made? Online, Telephone or the Branch?

Given the circumstances it might be wise for the OP not to go into too much detail on a public forum.

Ihaveaquery

Online. He had never made an online payment before and was coached through the entire process by the scammer. What a mess.

thanks all

Armorica

Good banks would have sent up a red flag on the second day at least.

The fraudster knew exactly what (he) was doing - payments under the fraud/flag limit for the bank.

Is it possible the bank called your friend and he confirmed he want to go ahead with the transaction? (It happens more than you would think)

Much of this doesn't help yet...but if you want to read up on stuff https://www.psr.org.uk/psr-publications/news-announcements/PSR-sets-out-progress-on-tackling-scams is useful.

Ben8282

This sounds like a novel way on the part of the friend of reducing the value of the estate to avoid payment of inheritance tax and/or depriving the beneficiaries of the estate of their inheritance and/or avoid settling the sisters debts from the estate..
It defies belief that your friend could have been so stupid. The very day after his sister had died, he answers the phone to somebody claiming to be from the 'fraud' office and obligingly follows their instructions without question and makes several large transfers of money from his deceased sisters account over a 4 day period to an unknown account somewhere.
How exactly did the people from the 'fraud office' contact him? Did they ask to speak to the sister when they called or the executor of her estate or what? Did he not think to decline to assist in the investigation? On what basis did he decide to assist these people in their investigation, even if he believed them to be the police, using money belonging to his deceased sister?
How did the fraudster know that his deceased sister just happened to have over £60K just sitting there in a current account and that your friend had the ability to access and transfer these funds?
Clearly your friend has done something very wrong here. If the sister had over £60K sitting in her account she was far from penniless when she died. Who was this money left to in her will? Did she have debts? Was her estate sufficiently large to be subject to inheritance tax?
Your friend is likely to find himself in big big trouble. The beneficiaries of her will may well sue him for their money or report him to the police for suspected embezzlement. If her estate is subject to inheritance tax, HMRC won't believe a word of it and will launch their own investigation of him and probably make him pay up regardless.

Ihaveaquery wrote: »

Online. He had never made an online payment before and was coached through the entire process by the scammer. What a mess.

And yet he knew all the necessary passwords and other log-in information to enable him to do this.

angela110660

scaredofdebt wrote: »

When I used to work for a bank, some 10 years ago, it was standard practise to telephone customers to check payments over a certain threshold were genuine, I think the limit was £5k. Some banks take security more seriously than others however.

If the bank knows about this "vulnerability", you'd expect them to take a bit more care especially with such suspicious transactions, but you'd need to seek legal advice to take this further, if it's even possible.

This is very interesting as a couple of weeks ago a mystery transaction for £4999.00 popped up in my pending bank transactions. Luckily I was checking online bank in the evening and saw it and it was blocked and is now under bank investigations. Obviously the £5k threshold was what the scammer was using to hide behind. Now I have a new bank card I am being sooooo cautious about using it - it almost squeaks!