Help! Father badly scammed

Owain_Moneysaver

The last few "large" transfers out I made (and nothing like the sum in question!) the bank cashier has explicitly read me a passage about fraud and how scammers will tell customers to transfer their funds to another account for safety.

Also, they have asked for additional evidence of identity such as sight of a second bank card with my name and signature on, and a supervisor has to authorise transactions over a certain limit.

It is possible that your father was so well 'groomed' that he talked his way through any security checks, but it doesn't reflect well on the bank.

MABLE

Its not surprising scammers never give up when they can so easily relieve the victim of their money. The victim may not use the internet but his family could have spoken to him about the dangers of being scammed.

I am very sorry for the victim but this could have easily been avoided. To me you all have to accept blame for this situation.

Bogof_Babe

As it was transferred into another bank account, isn't there an audit trail as to where it ended up?

agrinnall

Bogof_Babe wrote: »

As it was transferred into another bank account, isn't there an audit trail as to where it ended up?

Yes, but it probably won't help because the money is transferred out as soon as it arrives, often overseas where it's no longer easily traceable.

Flobberchops

That's a horrible situation to be in. Why did you father not at least confide in some close family about what was happening? Even if he was groomed into suspecting his bank was going to defraud him, surely he would still trust you enough to mention it?


The IFA certainly deserves to be raked over the coals but was ultimately just following his client's instructions. Likewise the bank has a set of human and machine security checks but if a customer walks in asking to transfer £X to sort code xx-xx-xx account number xxxxxxxx then that's a fairly binary outcome; either the bank do as instructed or they risk a formal complaint from a wealthy, long-standing customer. Old people are frequently wealthy. They also occasionally move their money around. There's nothing inherently unusual about that.


Ultimately it's a philosophical question about how far should banks go to protect customers from themselves, at the risk of infantilising grown adults, versus the responsibility of the individual to protect themselves from crime. And on balance although your father is indisputably the victim here, the error was also his. I feel you should focus on catching the scammers rather than punishing the middle-men.

Keep_pedalling

I do find this a little hard to believe. Money pulled from a private pension is subject to income tax which would be deducted by the pension provider, so it would not be possible to draw the lot down in one go without a massive amount of tax being deducted before he received it, something his IFA would advised him about along side a warning about CGT on investments outside a pension or ISA.

dmelife

The IFA would not have been able to facilitate a pension withdrawal without the full advice process being followed. So either this is a bull#%it tale or the IFA is liable, at least for the pension withdrawal. In theory, a reason for the large withdrawal from his investments, should have been recorded for AML purposes and covered off in a letter to the client, and the tax implications explained, even if ‘advice’ was not given.

colsten

Keep_pedalling wrote: »

I do find this a little hard to believe. Money pulled from a private pension is subject to income tax which would be deducted by the pension provider, so it would not be possible to draw the lot down in one go without a massive amount of tax being deducted before he received it, something his IFA would advised him about along side a warning about CGT on investments outside a pension or ISA.

If the investments were with more than one provider, none of them would / could have known the total tax liability and therefore couldn't have withheld all the tax due across all the withdrawals. The IFA, however, would have been able to work it out and would most likely have explained the tax position. Unless the IFA was involved in the scam, which is a possibility that Police no doubt will be investigating.

Benbythesea

Thanks everyone for taking time to respond. I'm sitting down with my father tomorrow so I can ascertain all correspondence with bank/FIA and details of the investments/pensions that were liquidated and we'll take it from there.

My father is only too aware of his stupidity and is a broken man. In a former life he was a well respected professional with huge integrity. Throughout his life he has invested wisely and made some good decisions. He is well informed and like all people his generation people have called him and tried to involve him in scams in the past and he has been wise to it. It was a clever scam in that he felt he wasn't able to discuss what was going on with anyone. This bunch of tricksters found his achilles heal and exploited it.

Thanks again

xylophone

It was a clever scam in that he felt he wasn't able to discuss what was going on with anyone.

Probably because

The caller said that my father’s account had been compromised and they believed that it was an “inside job”. For that reason the caller said that an investigator from the FCA would make contact. My father was duly called back by and after several conversation over a number of weeks my father was effectively “groomed” by the fraudsters. He believed that the FCA were about to make some high profile arrests

This bunch of tricksters found his achilles heal and exploited it.

In a former life he was a well respected professional with huge integrity.

I'm afraid it was his integrity that was his Achilles heel - the scammers relied on his not discussing what he thought to be an investigation of "an inside job"?