Why should we all pay for those who’ve been scammed?

Totally get your frustration - my University Educated brother has been scammed many times (and no porn star looking models dont message very disable middle aged overweight men promising to immediately take care of you) He has been repeatedly told by family, friends, the bank, social services and even the police that they are frauds but wont listen. Yes he is vulnerable and the bank have reimbursed once when it was clear one of their processes hadnt worked BUT no I dont think they should in the future. We have put in many safeguards to try and avoid him paying but the scammers then come in via Amazon cards, online payment portals etc, Its exhausting

Every single time though? What if they're not vulnerable, they are educated, and they ignored 17 different warnings, and the scam was one my 6 year old could identify?
Should they be reimbursed?

Of course crime victims should be reimbursed. Fraud takes many forms, not just romance scams. It often involves panicking and intimidating a vulnerable person.

Would having more branches open really prevent this?

Unless you are planning to get rid of internet banking and force everyone back into a branch, then presumably these sophisticated scammers can persuade their vulnerable victims that it would be much better if they used internet banking and sent them the money for their oil rig repairs/airline ticket/gold bars/medical bill immediately?

I don't want to sound in favour on branch closures - I think elderly and vulnerable people need them in other ways. But unless you want to get rid of internet banking, there will always be the option to use it and if you are vulnerable enough to fall for whatever the backstory is to why your Internet lover needs the money, then it isn't that hard to make you use the Internet banking to send it.

Also, presume there must be some double bluff scamming going on where someone pretends they thought that Jean Claude the handsome pilot really was in love with them and needed some money to pay for his broken wing, claims to have been scammed, gets the money back from their bank and whoever was playing Jean Claude was in on it all along and they both have the money.

Everyone you make a bank payment now you get warnings about looking for potential scams and have to click you’ve read them to continue. If you wilfully ignore these what else can banks do?

Exactly

There's only so much can be done to protect people against themselves, so providing they've been warned like this I see no case at all for banks to compensate

FWIW I have a severely disabled son myself who lost out, though admittedly it wasn't a lot since he doesn't have a lot of money to give - and it wouldn't even have occurred to me to ask the bank to cough up

The banks cost the UK government £137 billion in 2008, everyone had to bail the bank out - £92 million is a drop in the ocean

The four biggest banks alone made £20bn in profits last year. I think they can afford £92m in compensation for romance scams - that’s about £1.50 per person in the country, and it’s not like they were going to pass those profits on to customers anyway.

I felt really sorry for the lady on Steph's Packed Lunch. As she was recounting the story the way she phrased it and the details she went into that she really believed it all. She was talking about his projects and such, still as if they were real 😢

It’s not as simple as that. To take over someone’s finances you have to prove they do not have capacity around finances.

Someone can have learning difficulties, even a kind of a good 12 year old, but be able to do a simple budget, have direct debits set up for bills and know what day they get their money etc.
They may have never gotten into any debt and stick to a routine of withdrawing money on certain days etc.

So under the mental capacity act, they have capacity around finances right?

But then they meet someone online who doesn’t have learning difficulties and is able to easily manipulate them into believing they are in love with them. Then make them believe that they are about to be made homeless or something unless they get X amount of money.

So the adult with learning difficulties sends them X amount of money. Because they have been emotionally manipulated into doing so. Even if the person is clearly a scammer and not a gorgeous model/Nigerian prince.

They may have capacity around finances but that doesn’t negate the fact are vulnerable with learning difficulties.

What do you do then? Stop them from ever managing their money again?

It happens to reasonably intelligent people so can easily happen to adults with learning difficulties.

They should be refunded, safeguarded and educated. Not told they can’t get their money back and someone is now taking Power of Attorney over their money.

So you want rid of compensation?

And where exactly do the bank's profits come from, do you think?

[Deleted, quoted wrong post]

Also banks used to ring you up to tell you to confirm details of transactions if they thought they were suspicious.

So the fraudsters started doing this and banks were pretty slow to act and change their practices and continued to blame customers for being caught out and not give them their money back until they were forced to.

I was caught out once, not financially but opening a document in an email and putting my password in at work, which had a virus. I blame Microsoft as at the time I was always being asked to put in my password in and I thought nothing of it.

I think, @Raisinganiguana it was her way of telling you to be kinder and more compassionate. And I agree with her.

Fair point. £92m is a drop in the ocean in comparison.

YABU to assume vulnerable means wilfully stupid and uneducated. We can all be vulnerable at times, especially when unwell or distressed.

My lovely, highly educated (Professor) and very recently widowed friend was scammed out of €500 and thankfully, the bank repaid the money.

Initially, there were reams of paperwork to complete after her DH’s death and the bank cocked up when closing their former joint accounts and transferring sums to her newly opened current and savings accounts. Some idiot at the bank managed to freeze ALL of her accounts so she couldn’t even buy her food shopping and only discovered the problem when she got to the till. Luckily, I was with her and was able to pay using my card.

A couple of days later, she received a text telling her she owed money for the toll road in Dublin. This is a legitimate fee that is collected online rather than at the barrier and she assumed that her daughter from overseas had used their toll account when she was over for the funeral, so she went ahead and clicked on the link and put in her details to pay it. Luckily (!) she mentioned it to her daughter when she rang her that evening for their daily chat and the DD pointed out that she didn’t use the toll account so my friend immediately started checking her bank account online and discovered that there was a €500 pending payment for a hotel in South America. It took a few days to resolve but the bank re-credited her account.

My friend was in tears for allowing herself to be a victim of a scam and her confidence evaporated. She really didn’t need that on top of everything else she’d been dealing with.

If you think a £92m annual cost to banks results in us all paying higher interest rates on debt, or us getting less interest on savings, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.

If you try and find a little more compassion perhaps you may realise this £92m costs us nothing. This thread and some of the responses remind me of the speech given by the Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker. In it he said:

“If you want to be successful in this world, you have to develop your own idiot detection system. The best way to spot an idiot? Look for the person who is cruel,” adding, “When we see someone who doesn't look like us, or sound like us, or act like us, or love like us, or live like us—the first thought that crosses almost everyone's brain is rooted in either fear or judgement or both. That's evolution. We survived as a species by being suspicious of things we aren't familiar with.”
“In order to be kind, we have to shut down that animal instinct and force our brain to travel a different pathway. Empathy and compassion are evolved states of being. They require the mental capacity to step past our most primal urges,” Mr Pritzker explained.
Stressing the importance of being kind, Mr Pritzker added, “I'm here to tell you that when someone's path through this world is marked with acts of cruelty, they have failed the first test of an advanced society. They never forced their animal brain to evolve past its first instinct. They never forged new mental pathways to overcome their own instinctual fears. And so, their thinking and problem-solving will lack the imagination and creativity that the kindest people have in spades… Over my many years in politics and business, I have found one thing to be universally true—the kindest person in the room is often the smartest.”

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/the-graduation-speech-that-is-winning-the-internet-how-to-spot-an-idiot-4162620

Jeez @Tiredalwaystired I'm so sorry that happened to you. How devastating for you, emotionally even more than financially I'd imagine. Hope you are on the way to getting over it now and I hope the bank helped you too 💐

I didn't actually know you could get your money back for romance scams.

There have been terrible cases like fake pension funds being set up where the banks were pretty awful and practically facilitated the fraud.

I'm in two minds.

On the one hand - Banks and other companies who are highly regulated have to have a lot of user training in place - Things like when you're sent an OTP (One time password) and it says in texts 'NEVER TELL THIS TO ANYONE'... and yet people still tell the 'Nice man on the phone' the password as the nice man has phoned up, told the individual they're being hacked and they need to move the money into a 'safe' account until their account is 'better'.

You also get regular emails from companies offering you guidance around security best practices..... landing screens with guidance... even when you're trying to transfer money there are a number of checks that take place and if you override them when a bank says 'The name and account don't match, are you SURE you want to go ahead?' then that's on you.

So maybe pay attention to the guidance, don't just gloss over it and if you think 'Well, it won't happen to me' and it does - take some responsibility for it.

On the other hand - I appreciate that the tactics and approaches used to scam people can be incredibly complex and some are exceptionally hard to spot - for example, if you're buying a house and get an email from your 'solicitors' telling you that they've changed their bank account and please pay your stamp duty into a different account... and it turns out that the solicitors have had a BEC (Business Email Compromise) - and you've just transferred £££££ into some random persons bank account. Is that your fault? The solicitors fault?

I have sympathy for certain individuals who get scammed - not others, however to distinguish between them is impossible.

There's a few interesting Youtubers I watch - Kitboga / Scammer Payback / Social Catfish - all of them talk you through a lot of the common scams used whether it's romance catfishing / Microsoft Virus scamming etc....It's interesting to see what's being used in various parts of the world.

The only reason they ask you so many questions in the branch about who you are paying is that the money laundering rules are so so tight and stringent for banks. Customers being scammed, nah, they are not so bothered by that!

@Sparehair in branch they ask you how you know this person. Where did you meet them. How long have you known them. How did they give you details of your bank account.
I am I suspect flagged as vulnerable because I have sight loss. But they don't just say oh you want to transfer money let me do it. And they do make clear if you lie or transfer against their advice you can't claim money back.
But online banks don't give a shit.

The money is usually long gone into another account, possibly abroad. It is often moved into one or several other accounts within minutes of being paid. Scammers often takeover existing accounts that someone no longer wants. There are people who will actually sell their dormant account or allow a scammer to use it for a fee so it's not a simple case of making it harder to open an account to stop them.
Fraud costs a hell of a lot more than £92m a year. In the first half of 2022 it was circa £610m but obviously that's not all romance fraud. And banks fraud prevention systems prevented another £584m. In that period £140.1m was returned to victims of push payment fraud.