Virgin Money Current Account

Archi_Bald

The most obvious in my view is to educate people so that they can make better decisions for themselves. I would hazard a guess that you haven't fallen victim to an APP scam any more than I did, and that you wouldn't fall for one in the future any more than I would if there was no name check.

yorkshireOAP

Seems I have kicked something off here, debate is always good. Thanks for the comments. To update I did another transfer to VM from my FD account, same warning but after triple checking my info, proceeded, Money deposited within seconds! All this to get £20 interest pa on £1000. Is it worth the trauma?

eskbanker

Archi_Bald said:

The most obvious in my view is to educate people so that they can make better decisions for themselves. I would hazard a guess that you haven't fallen victim to an APP scam any more than I did, and that you wouldn't fall for one in the future any more than I would if there was no name check.

I agree that education is valuable but was trying to tease out what specific preventive controls you feel would be more productive for the banks to implement than CoP.  There is already plenty of education - Virgin are typical in linking to the Take Five initiative at https://uk.virginmoney.com/virgin/service/staying-safe-online/ and presumably also have warnings plastered all over the relevant pages when setting up new payees, etc - and I'm not saying there couldn't be more, but still wouldn't see that as a reason not to implement CoP, or for education to be seen as an alternative to it.

There is of course a school of thought that people careless enough to be scammed should accept the financial consequences, but this is emphatically not the view of the regulator and other influential industry bodies, so if the banks are expected to be on the hook for the cost then it's hardly a surprise that they'll look to implement direct controls to minimise the occurrence of APP scams, while also raising awareness, etc.

Always a dangerous subject, but if CoP is effective in eliminating or substantially reducing APP fraud, what do you feel are the likely new scams that would take its place?

Archi_Bald

eskbanker said: 

Always a dangerous subject, but if CoP is effective in eliminating or substantially reducing APP fraud, what do you feel are the likely new scams that would take its place?

I think we should leave it here. I will hardly discuss on an open internet forum what [new] scams are now possible🕵️‍♀️

RG2015

Archi_Bald said:

eskbanker said: 

Always a dangerous subject, but if CoP is effective in eliminating or substantially reducing APP fraud, what do you feel are the likely new scams that would take its place?

I think we should leave it here. I will hardly discuss on an open internet forum what [new] scams are now possible🕵️‍♀️

I disagree that we should not discuss possible scams on an open internet forum. It is unlikely that scammers will get new ideas that they have not already thought of.

It is always good to have conversations on open forums so that people are made aware of any possible risks that may confront them.

As to COP, it is better to have it than not to but as ever there are limitations and quirks of which the user needs to be aware. 

Archi_Bald

RG2015 said:

Archi_Bald said:

eskbanker said: 

Always a dangerous subject, but if CoP is effective in eliminating or substantially reducing APP fraud, what do you feel are the likely new scams that would take its place?

I think we should leave it here. I will hardly discuss on an open internet forum what [new] scams are now possible🕵️‍♀️

I disagree that we should not discuss possible scams on an open internet forum. It is unlikely that scammers will get new ideas that they have not already thought of.

Feel free to go ahead without me.

eskbanker

Archi_Bald said:

eskbanker said: 

Always a dangerous subject, but if CoP is effective in eliminating or substantially reducing APP fraud, what do you feel are the likely new scams that would take its place?

I think we should leave it here. I will hardly discuss on an open internet forum what [new] scams are now possible🕵️‍♀️

Fair enough - I was just wondering if there was anything in particular you had in mind when suggesting that tightening APP controls would lead to other scams taking its place, not that I'd necessarily disagree, in that logic dictates that committed fraudsters are hardly going to walk away and accept defeat!

And just to be clear, I wouldn't expect anyone to disclose details of how to enact fraud, but was thinking more of the sort of extensive categorisation used in the illuminating annual fraud reports from UK Finance, which show APP fraud to have increased by 29% to £456m last year.  APP as a percentage of fraud increased from 30% in 2018 to 36% in 2019, so it's unsurprising that this is an area that the industry is keen to clamp down on....

https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/system/files/Fraud-The-Facts-2020-FINAL-ONLINE-14-May.pdf

kaMelo

The point I would make is that a lot of the APP scams would not necessarily be stopped with CoP.  Every case I've read about already had huge red flags that screamed out "stop what you are doing" at some point therefore I don't necessarily believe CoP would have made much difference, the warning signs were already there. I accept the cases I've read about are a tiny fraction of the overall number so I would be interested to read of any case whereby it might of made a difference.

Overall it's another level of checking which I don't necessarily disagree and it could prevent mistaken transfers such as a wrong account no. or sort code being used. Security though has always to be a balance between being secure and usable. The more secure you make something the more burdensome it tends to become to use and in some cases can actually reduce security. Then you need to factor in that people are always the weakest link because we're lazy, creatures of habit and we can't remember fifteen character random passwords in our heads.

On reflection CoP isn't the answer but it's not necessarily wrong as it may prevent some things going wrong, I just wish the implementation was better.

eskbanker

kaMelo said:

The point I would make is that a lot of the APP scams would not necessarily be stopped with CoP.  Every case I've read about already had huge red flags that screamed out "stop what you are doing" at some point therefore I don't necessarily believe CoP would have made much difference, the warning signs were already there. I accept the cases I've read about are a tiny fraction of the overall number so I would be interested to read of any case whereby it might of made a difference.

Much of it is effectively about transferring liability from bank to customer - if the bank provides enough information for the customer to make an informed decision but the customer still chooses to continue then the bank no longer has any liability for reimbursement of consequent losses.  The above UK Finance report states that since the introduction of the voluntary APP code a year ago, 41% of these losses were reimbursed to the customer, and therefore 59% obviously weren't, which presumably means that banks were able to pin the liability back onto the negligence of the customer.  It seems to me that those customers who are determined to proceed regardless of warnings will do so anyway (especially if vulnerable to social engineering), so CoP will indeed only ever be a partial solution, but again I don't think that inability to solve the problem completely should be used to justify not doing anything.

Having said that, I agree that a flawed implementation can severely impact the initiative's credibility, so the sooner the wrinkles are ironed out the better!

badger09

Back to the topic of the Virgin Money Current account:

I opened my account 3 June and paid in 3 amounts, total £1k. The cleared balance shows correctly as £1000, but there are still no transactions showing in the account or in the timeline.

Is this normal?