Spoken to bank re losing money to remote working scam - what next ?

eskbanker

deejaybee said:

Any advice what to do re the Whatapp numbers i have accumulated ?

Have one for the fake job agency, One for "user support",  Two for my "mentor",  One for the person who said they started new as same time as me,  and one for the group chat.

was planning to report & block, anything else worthwhile? 

No harm in reporting the numbers to WhatsApp but you might struggle to convince them of a demonstrable breach of their terms.

You could try reporting the matter to the police, rather than just Action Fraud, but it seems unlikely that burner phones and crypto wallets would form any meaningful evidence trail to follow.

deejaybee

Have also emailed the legit Feedvisor company, notifying them of the scam site - got an out of office reply, hopefully they pick it up on Monday.

And as said earlier, already advised the legit Recruitment agency.

TheBanker

There are published FOS decisions where people have fallen for similar scams. 

The key point is that as the money was initially transferred to a Coinbase account in your name, the APP provisions won't apply because they only apply if you're transferring money to an account that belongs to someone else.

However, FOS also look at whether the sending bank's transaction monitoring should have reasonably raised scam concerns and if so whether the bank should have intervened. In most cases they seem to decline the complaints because the transactions don't appear out of the ordinary compared to the customer's usual activity. Where FOS do think the bank should have done more, they then try to establish how the customer would have responded to a warning.

Here are a couple of recent examples of declined cases:
https://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/decision/DRN-5413410.pdf
https://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/decision/DRN-4895298.pdf

And here's one that was upheld:
https://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/decision/DRN-5173179.pdf

I am afraid the people behind this are likely based overseas, so there is very little the UK authorities can to find and punish them. Even if their phone numbers and websites get blocked, they'll just get more phone numbers and make new websites and move onto the next set of victims.