My dad has been scammed out of £19,000

AWOL84

colsten said:

harz99 said:

Prism said:

Oh, and as a side note in your first post you claim to be the scammer who took the money

The Op claims no such thing, admittedly the sentence would read better if there was a comma after the word "phone", however imho the meaning of that sentence is quite clear, especially as there is not a comma between "moment" and "as" which would have the effect of doing exactly what you alledge.  

He absolutely does, most probably inadvertently, claim exactly that. Any comma as you suggest would have made no difference whatsoever. What would have made a difference would be the word 'with', in between "as I am" and "the scammer".

Are you actually being serious????

colsten

Well yes.

Moving on, what about answers to this?

robatwork

One of the reasons you are being pressed on the details isn't that we think you or your father are lying or stupid - it's that we want to know the exact mechanism the scammers used. This will help anyone else reading protect their loved ones with a cogent explanation.

It's a given that your father was technically naive and the scammers are criminal and convincing shysters. Surely by now you have gathered enough information to answer Colsten's queries?

DCFC79

Onto page 11 and still not got to the bottom of it.

Dr_Crypto

There must be something about the original payee. 

The OP seems very reluctant to answer anything about them despite claiming they were/are legit. 

I’m wondering if the original payee is part of the scam. 

colsten

Dr_Crypto said:

There must be something about the original payee. 

The OP seems very reluctant to answer anything about them despite claiming they were/are legit. 

I’m wondering if the original payee is part of the scam. 

Whilst I agree that this is one possible explanation, I am tempted to lean more towards this "existing payee got modified" story to be an inadvertent red herring.

As I reported above, in Natwest online banking and in their app, you can set up more than one set of sort code / account number with the same payee name, and you can make payments to any sort code / account number with the same payee name without adding that combination of payee name / sort code / account number to your list of payees.  Crucially, in your list of transactions, all you can see in online banking and in the app is the payee name. Not the sort code and account number.

If this sounds complicated:

• assume that on your list of payees you have a payee called Joe Bloggs, sort code 01-02-03 acct no 12345678. You make a payment of £5 to this payee.
• you then make a £10 payment to a new payee. You call that new payee Joe Bloggs, and the sort code is 04-05-06 acct no 87654321. You choose not to add this payee to your list of payees.
• in your transaction list you see two payments: one for £5 to Joe Bloggs, and one for £10 to Joe Bloggs. You cannot tell from your transaction list which Joe Bloggs what amount went to, as Natwest do not show you the sort code and account number the payment was made to
• So you could be forgiven to think that Joe Bloggs on 01-02-03 12345678 got £15

Hope I have explained this sufficiently clearly.

Using the above example further:

• the father has set up Joe Bloggs 01-02-03 12345678 and pays him £100 (or whatever)
• the scammer then [somehow] makes a payment to Joe Bloggs 04-05-06 87654321 of £19,000
• all father can see in his transaction list is two payments to Joe Bloggs, £100 and £19,000. He cannot see which sort code / account number either of the payments went to (Natwest, of course, can see it)

So far, so good.

But in Natwest online banking [or in the app], you cannot make a payment to a new payee for £19,000 without a card reader. As @awol84 is adamant his father never used a card reader, the only other explanation is that the scammer used the card reader - - - and for that he needs to have the father's debit card. Thus the question: where is the father's debit card? 

The father could, of course, be in possession of a debit card for his account. But the scammer could have reported the card as lost, requested a new card, and potentially a new PIN, and intercepted the father's post. Thus the question: does any third party have access, authorised or unauthorised, to father's post? (We can't know for certain, but Natwest would have a lot of information about any requests for new card / new PIN)

If the answers are that father is in possession of the debit card and that there is no way anyone else could have obtained a replacement card and PIN, and the payment shows as having gone to Joe Bloggs

• the father, or someone authorised by him, must have used the card reader (and card + PIN)
• the payment could have gone to the same "Joe Bloggs" who was paid last year, or it could have gone to a "Joe Bloggs " with a different sort code and account number

I'd love to be part of the Natwest / NCA team investigating this case 🕵️‍♀️👮‍♀️🕵️‍♀️👮‍♀️🕵️‍♀️👮‍♀️

kaMelo

Dr_Crypto said:

There must be something about the original payee. 

The OP seems very reluctant to answer anything about them despite claiming they were/are legit. 

I’m wondering if the original payee is part of the scam. 

This was the point I was trying to make albeit in a poor way. Scams like this are not impossible but they are certainly not simple to achieve and require planning. In that context team Viewer is a red herring, it doesn't enable the scam in any way and focusing on it distracts from what does matter.
To the OP I'm sorry you were upset with my comments that what they were telling us was not the whole story. You are adamant that what you are telling us is what happened but you cannot know that is what happened as you weren't there. You are relaying what you were told happened yet we know it cannot have happened. Sort codes/account numbers cannot be changed on existing payee's and new ones require a card reader. These are security features to help prevent exactly this kind of thing. It used to be possible to do both of these things but they changed it over a decade ago. Reference numbers can be changed without a card reader but will generate a warning text, in fact doing some tests any kind of change  whatsoever or new creation now seem to generate a warning text.

A couple of questions, does your father still have his debit card in his possession and does the phone number listed in his banking details still work and always has worked?

dggar

colsten said:

Dr_Crypto said:

There must be something about the original payee. 

The OP seems very reluctant to answer anything about them despite claiming they were/are legit. 

I’m wondering if the original payee is part of the scam. 

......

• in your transaction list you see two payments: one for £5 to Joe Bloggs, and one for £10 to Joe Bloggs. You cannot tell from your transaction list which Joe Bloggs what amount went to, as Natwest do not show you the sort code an account number the payment was made to
• So you could be forgiven to think that Joe Bloggs on 01-02-03 12345678 got £15

Hope I have explained this sufficiently clearly.

......
I'd love to be part of the Natwest / NCA team investigating this case 🕵️‍♀️👮‍♀️🕵️‍♀️👮‍♀️🕵️‍♀️👮‍♀️

Very good explanation, It begs the question as to why Natwest (and preumably RBS) do not show the sort code and account number.

[Deleted User]

In that context team Viewer is a red herring, it doesn't enable the scam in any way and focusing on it distracts from what does matter.

Team Viewer is very much part of these scams. I've watched some "scam baiters" on you tube that show what happens when you go along with these scammers, they can manipulate the information on screen to show different account balances and one of the tricks is to make you think you have more money in your account than you should - ie claim that somebody accidentally transferred / refunded £19,000 and just need it sending back to make things right. On screen it will appear like you have lost nothing. 

After reading this full thread, the only conclusion I can come to is that this was a second time scam therefore not requiring a new payee to be set up. The first scam might have been insignificant, say £80 to remove some virus from the PC (a common one) and may never flagged as a scam at the time but the payee was set up then (ie about Nov 2019 according to OP). Additionally the payee name might look genuine - eg BT

But the only things that don't fit is the suggestion the payee details / reference was changed - my Nat West account requires a card reader to change payee reference using the web (not the app) but I note some other comments on the thread said it didn't require a card reader. Don't know if this is the same for all accounts.

Roger.Wilco

dggar said:

Very good explanation, It begs the question as to why Natwest (and preumably RBS) do not show the sort code and account number.

Unfortunately, its not just Natwest - a few months ago - I raised a complaint with HSBC about exactly the same thing.  That one-time transfers DO show sort-code & account number - but standing orders once setup & saved - DON'T.  For me this was exacerbated by the fact that HSBC had started to overwrite new standing order references with the account names as returned by the other bank - so I had a few standing orders all going to Roger.Wilco but had no idea as to which account they referred to.

I got as far as talking to someone (who purported to be from) HSBC's security team who agreed with me.  But the conclusion was that this issue with web-banking and information presentation wasn't going to change anytime soon.