My dad has been scammed out of £19,000

[Deleted User]

k12479 said:

Deleted_User said:

There was potentially a lot more to be gained from the subsequent moving to safe accounts and far easier to convince somebody who has just seen £19k go missing in front of them.

Natwest daily transfer limits appear to be £20k or £50k. If the former, that would leave just £1k for the scammer, if the latter the scammer would still forgo a significant chunk unnecessarily.

Good point, the scams I've read about on the financial ombudsman site then ask the victim to go into the branch rather than online for the next stage - no limits on that and therefore could potentially move far more than £20k in one shot.

So if the victim has £200k in their bank, the scammer is only getting £20k and only got one shot at it unless they can convince them to go into the branch, still worth the £19k hit to get them to visit the branch and send £181k.

kaMelo

It doesn't appear that you or your father have received the greatest service in this investigation by NatWest yet hopefully things will turn out okay in the end. At least the money is still there so it's just a case of repatriation.
At least with the new information you've provided things kind of make sense.

I think it's one of two possiblities, either the most useless scammer in the world, transferring money to some random payee in the hope of somehow contacting them and even if they did contact them, convincing them it's a payment error and to pay it back to a completely different account, thank you very much.  Even though you mentioned the bank staff suggested this happens I'm not convinced, there are too many things that make it an unreliable scam.
Or,  what Deleted_User said with the four step scam process, and in doing so retract my earlier comments about TeamViewer.
Using TeamViewer they will know how much money is in an account and then "sacrifice" an appropriate sum to some random payee to convince the person money is going missing. The scammer then hopefully (for them) can take things forward to the real scam, moving the much larger amount to a so called "safe" account.   I actually think this is more likely.

The only thing that doesn't make sense is NatWest stating a card reader was used despite you saying your father is insistent he hasn't used one.  I know you said you intend to take your father's business elsewhere but for the time being would think the wise thing to do would be to cancel the current debit card and get a new one just to close off the possibility. 

Edited to add as I've only just remembered.
Natwest also supply an "Online Banking Card." It's essentially a card with only one purpose, to use in a card reader and, importantly, it works in addition to a debit card and will give you full access to online banking. Maybe worth asking if the account has had one of these issued.  

born_again

colsten said:

This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why would a random scammer

1. have your father's telephone number
2. know the contact details of someone your father paid a year ago

Plus, why would your father pay £19k to someone he paid a year ago, even though he does not owe that payee a penny?

The whole think stinks.

1. How do scammers get any ones telephone number then?
2. They picked a random payee, that would appear not to be a personal payee. (easier to scam the money back to another account) when it is a company. A company will not have any account details to send it back too, when it was just a payment to them for services. Rather than say a family member. Who should check 1st before doing anything, or at least use a known transfer already set up to the scammed account. 

Change of payee text is a red herring. Could have come from scammers. Or they had tried but it failed.

It all now make perfect sense.

As to NatWest. These are not easy to investigate and some call center staff think they are helping by giving out some information they think is correct. But due to lack of knowledge are barking up the wrong tree.
Better to wait till the actual team that deal with these look into the full details.

AWOL84

colsten said:

AWOL84 said:

The card reader wasn’t used and the money was sent to an original payee which pretty much concludes they’ve done little in the way of “investigation”. It wouldn’t have taken Colombo to have worked that one out but it seems it was too much for the NatWest team to handle. 

We've gone round and round this. To recap:  It is impossible to change the payee in Natwest online banking without a card reader. You reported your dad had a text confirming a change of payee, and you reported that Natwest confirmed that the card reader was used (though you did not report what Natwest said the card reader was used for). 

None of this means that the card reader was used to pay the £19k. As there are no text msgs for confirming a payment with the card reader, the card reader may or may not have been used for the actual payment. Natwest will know whether it was or not.

I am afraid, there are still many unanswered questions.

AWOL84 said:

As the guy said above it appears they transferred the money in the hope of tracking the other person down to then transfer the money back into another account, both NatWest and the payees bank said the same thing that it’s quite a common trick they use.

This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why would a random scammer

1. have your father's telephone number
2. know the contact details of someone your father paid a year ago

Plus, why would your father pay £19k to someone he paid a year ago, even though he does not owe that payee a penny?

bradders1983 said:

Would also question why the bloke who received the £19k didnt do anything about it off his own back, surely he would have known who sent it him?

Exactly. You would expect that he noticed £19k that unexpectedly arrived in his account, and would at least have discussed it with his bank / requested that the money would be sent back to where it came from.

The whole think stinks.

Listen mate I've been quite polite with you but you're now really beginning to get on my nerves. You seem to have this ridiculous idea that somehow I'm involved in some elaborate scam. I've taken a glance over some other posts and it seems you get a kick out of this as I'm not the first person you've gone at like this.

For the LAST and FINAL time my dad received a text from Natwest saying the payee details had been UPDATED. Why this text was prompted when the money was directed to the original account, I don't know.

The email we recieved from Natwest said they'd carried out a thorough investigation, when they clearly didn't. As the money was sent to the original payee that had been used before, why didn't they tell us this? They said a card reader had been used when it hadn't and I think they've based the email on the numerous phonecalls I've had with Natwest where I explained what happened and they've given false information in error.

Before I knew the orignal payee had received the money I rang Natwest to raise an appeal on the case based on numerous things;

1. A card reader was NOT used. I said to them that they must have the capabilities to check if a card reader has been used and they said they did, so I said go ahead and do your check as part of this appeal process.

2. The fact a note was on the system mentioning that their fraud team had picked up on potential fraud.

3. The fact they failed to raise the case to the relevant team for over 24 hours.

4. The general level of response and care received from the bank.

--
As for the rest of your comments. The payee was contacted immediately by his own bank who instantly witheld the funds and they notified him of that on the day. Why would he have to act on the back of that?

I'm not sure what sort of kick you get from making silly accusations but my patience has worn thin on you and I won't be engaging with you again.

AWOL84

[Deleted User] said:

If you have read every post on this it makes total sense and sounds like the OP stopped the scam in the nick of time - the scammer hadn't actually reached the point of extracting money yet and that's why most of the commenters above are confused.

1. OP said he was alerted that his Dad was taking a call from somebody "trying to stop money from leaving his account" - the classic "move to safe account" scam from someone pretending to be a bank employee.
   
   
2. In order to the convince the victim that money was leaving without his permission, the scammer connected via TeamViewer made a transfer to a known payee as that was the easiest way without any verification or action from the victim (the OP's dad didn't make the £19k transfer). This would add urgency and emotion to the situation to get the victim to do whatever was asked as the victim could now see £19k was missing from his bank.**
   
   
3. The next step never happened but the plan would be to ask the victim to transfer the rest of his money to a "safe account(s)" to prevent any more going missing. That was the point the OP got the phone call from his mother and asked for the computer / internet to be disconnected so this step of the scam never went ahead. But this was the step that would have sent the rest of the money to the scammers account(s) [and the step that would have required card reader etc] EDIT: probably ask the victim to go into branch and make one big transfer eg £100k
    
4. Bloke that was sent the £19k was just an innocent party used randomly in the scam. It so happened that he never received it, his bank withheld the money so he knew nothing about where it came from or what was happening.
   
   

Why I think people might be missing this point is that I assume there was a lot more than £19k in that account and using the £19k transfer was just bait to convince the victim that money was going missing and possibly a test of the transfer limit.

There was potentially a lot more to be gained from the subsequent moving to safe accounts and far easier to convince somebody who has just seen £19k go missing in front of them.


** for clarity about step 2, the scammer doesn't let the victim know that he can control his computer with Teamviewer or even see the screen. This adds legitimacy when the pretend bank employee says things that only the bank would know - eg balance of the account etc. The scammer will blank the screen of the victim with some technical excuse or send them away from the screen to "check the lights on their router" and whist this happens will make the transfer to a random payee. When the victim gets back the pretend banker says they can see somebody stealing the money and of course now the victim can see that on-screen as well.

Thanks for your response and this all seems very plausible. It was either in the nick of time as you say or they could somehow track the payee down but I have no idea how this would be possible when it took me two hours to locate his company on Google when my dad could only remember part of his company name.

The only thing you're wrong on is the level of money in my fathers account. Losing that £19,000 would have left him and my mother (both late 70s) with less than £5,000.

Ergates

bradders1983 said:

Would also question why the bloke who received the £19k didnt do anything about it off his own back, surely he would have known who sent it him?

How, exactly?  Even if the recipient's bank hadn't stopped the transfer, a transfer *in* to your account doesn't show any sender details, just a reference that the sender *should* supply.  If there is no invoice (and thus no reference), then how on earth could they know who it was from - at most they could contact the bank and say "Some money appeared in my account that I wasn't expecting"

colsten

AWOL84 said:

I'm not sure what sort of kick you get from making silly accusations but my patience has worn thin on you and I won't be engaging with you again.

I am not making silly accusations but I am asking questions and am looking for possible explanations. I won't be going over old ground again - suffice to say, Natwest will have more facts than you or anyone else on here about what actually happened on your father's account. They will eventually make a decision, and your father may well have to take the case to the FOS, who will then make a final decision.

Shakin_Steve

I'm just pleased it's sorted. If I ever have a problem such as this, I'll try and sort it out myself, I won't ask on here, that's for sure.

k12479

born_again said:
2. They picked a random payee, that would appear not to be a personal payee. (easier to scam the money back to another account) when it is a company.... 

It all now make perfect sense

Are you saying it'd be easier to scam a company than an individual? Not sure I'd agree with that.

Still doesn't seem an obvious strategy to me. Here the scammer has to:
1. Convince person A to make a transfer, or gain access to do it themselves
2. Hope it doesn't get flagged by the outgoing or incoming bank
3. Track down person/company B
4. Convince B to make a transfer
5. Hope it doesn't get flagged by the outgoing or incoming bank

If the scammer can overcome 1 & 2, then the overpayment-type scam tacked on just reduces the probability of success significantly. Also I note the OP managed to track down the payee who was contacted by his bank, but there's no mention of him being contacted by anyone requesting an erroneous payment be refunded.

bradders1983

Ergates said:

bradders1983 said:

Would also question why the bloke who received the £19k didnt do anything about it off his own back, surely he would have known who sent it him?

How, exactly?  Even if the recipient's bank hadn't stopped the transfer, a transfer *in* to your account doesn't show any sender details

Yes it does, if an A Smith send me money it will show as "A Smith" on my statement if that is the name the account is in. Granted it wont show the sort code and account number but its not as its a blind transfer, is it?