My dad has been scammed out of £19,000

Dr_Crypto

That is a very clear post, Colsten, and may well be what happened. 
However, the issue about the card does seem to be difficult to reconcile. Even if the scammers had obtained a replacement card then wouldn't the father's original card have stopped working? Had he been using his card or had it stopped working? 

Call me a cynic but the OP's reluctance to discuss anything about the original payee is ringing alarm bells. 

colsten

Dr_Crypto said:

Even if the scammers had obtained a replacement card then wouldn't the father's original card have stopped working? Had he been using his card or had it stopped working? 

That's right, his card would have stopped working. But the father wouldn't have noticed it unless he had recently used the card for ATM withdrawals or purchases. Given that @AWOL84 has not mentioned any known issues with the debit card, we can conclude that either the father is in possession of the card in working order (in which case he was complicit by using the card reader), or that he hasn't used the card in some time and it may have been stolen or replaced (in which case the scammer could have used the card to authorise the payment). We'll probably never know what's what, as facts are slow / missing. Like with all the other stuff that's gone on, Natwest will obviously have a lot more information than we have. 

TrickyDicky101

That was a very good explanation colsten.
However, I have the NatWest app on my iPhone and I can definitively set up a new payee without a card reader (as I don't have one although have had one in the past).  

bradders1983

TrickyDicky101 said:

That was a very good explanation colsten.
However, I have the NatWest app on my iPhone and I can definitively set up a new payee without a card reader (as I don't have one although have had one in the past).  

Without trawling back through the thread, I think this has been acknowledged but you can only pay them up to £1k on the app first time out.

garmeg

TrickyDicky101 said:

That was a very good explanation colsten.
However, I have the NatWest app on my iPhone and I can definitively set up a new payee without a card reader (as I don't have one although have had one in the past).  

But you need to authorise the app in the first place and you need to know the  user name (account number plus year of birth or part surname I think) and password to be able to do that.

TrickyDicky101

My point was it is possible to set up a new payee via the app.  I didn't realise that had already been acknowledged - so fair enough - and I agree there are plenty of hoops to jump through to get it to work.

garmeg

TrickyDicky101 said:

My point was it is possible to set up a new payee via the app.  I didn't realise that had already been acknowledged - so fair enough - and I agree there are plenty of hoops to jump through to get it to work.

Seems to be more holes than hoops in this story I think.

colsten

TrickyDicky101 said:

However, I have the NatWest app on my iPhone and I can definitively set up a new payee without a card reader (as I don't have one although have had one in the past).  

I know that. But I also know that you cannot make a payment above £1K to such a payee without going to online banking and approving at least one  such payment. Which you can only achieve by using the card reader.

This is the message you get in the app



There is further information about the payment limit when you are trying to make a payment in the app, and there's simply no way to bypass the limit.

colsten

TrickyDicky101 said:

My point was it is possible to set up a new payee via the app.  I didn't realise that had already been acknowledged - so fair enough - and I agree there are plenty of hoops to jump through to get it to work.

The scammer could indeed have set up a new payee in the app - provided they had access too the father's account through the app. Whilst this is a possible scenario, we have no idea whether the app was ever used to access the father's account (but Natwest would know if it was). Even if we assume that this is what happened, the use of the card reader would still have been necessary to approve a single payment of £19k to a newly set up payee. 

Mickey666

Dr_Crypto said:

That is a very clear post, Colsten, and may well be what happened. 
However, the issue about the card does seem to be difficult to reconcile. Even if the scammers had obtained a replacement card then wouldn't the father's original card have stopped working? Had he been using his card or had it stopped working? 

Call me a cynic but the OP's reluctance to discuss anything about the original payee is ringing alarm bells. 

Call me a cynic as well, but is it possible the OP is planning their own scam and is using the collective experience and expertise of this forum to conduct an 'experimental' fraud to see where the weaknesses might lie and to gauge the chances of getting away with it?