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

Not sure why they would refund them. My bank won't even refund scams from a registered company

I got my money back from Netflix when someone in a foreign country upgraded my account and logged into it using an old password that had been leaked by another site. I had never logged into Netflix away from home so a log in from Nigeria and an upgrade should have been automatically blocked and further verification required.
It was right I was reimbursed.

Maybe when you do the transfer they need to flash up a picture of a hot guy/ girl driving a Ferrari and it says “ do you think this guy/ girl would be interested in you?” If you say yes it blocks your account and you get sent off for reeducation before you’re trusted with grown up things again.

@Stroopwaffels you are wrong. Try and pay money to someone new in a branch and they ask you so many questions. Because they know people who use bank branches tend to be vulnerable. It's not people fault so many branches have closed.
And in branches they make clear that if it is a fraud you will not get your money back. Because there they do proper checks.

The banks shouldn’t be allowing you to just transfer a load of money to a random in another country like that. They need more security measures in place.

I once had a cheque book intercepted and a man with a name nothing like mine cleared my account with two separate cheques not signed be me, but by a man with a foreign name. They had to reimburse me. But honestly what on earth were they thinking? He went into a branch and just cleared the account. Why did no one think it was a bit odd?

Banks have a duty of care and should be able to prevent vulnerable customers from transferring their life savings to strangers.

They do. But anyone who has ever paid any money to anyone knows that first there's the check to confirm that the account name matches what you've put in, and then the app or website will ask you what the payment is for. You are warned about scams and fraud before making the transfer.

You cannot protect people against their own stupidity, if they are stupid enough to believe that they are sending money to an American soldier or doctor who just happens to need money to release medical equipment or get his gold bars out of the middle east then you deserve everything you get.

The banks have set up processes that are vulnerable to fraud for their own financial gain. They need to treat the financial downsides of that as business costs.

Yes or a lower savings rate because believe it or nor banks compete for customers

The warnings aren’t meant to change customer behaviour. They’re intended to push responsibility away from the bank and on to the customer

I’ve worked in this area too. I also now work in an area requiring knowledge of human psychology. The scammers play on people’s psychological weak spots and leverage common psychological responses. Some people are more vulnerable than others, for sure. But that doesn’t mean those people should just be thrown to the wolves.

The reason the banks pay you back is that they should have better anti scam protections in place and they don't!

I hope you never get scammed op! It can literally happen to anyone now as the scammers are becoming much more sophisticated.

I bet when you are scammed ( and you will be) you will be grateful this process exists. However if you are philosophically opposed you can then hand back the money !

Bad day at work when fall for scam and lose employer Kent hairbrushes . £1.6m and banks don't refund businesses nor its seems do much to trace fraudsters but guess is even less incentive when no loss to their profits.

I'm not sure it's easy to tell who the vulnerable people are as an outsider, perhaps if they fall for these romance scams they should also get some sort of social/health check up.
I'm quite savvy but still nearly put my details into one of the parcel scams as I was awaiting a parcel and was tired/stressed my mind was elsewhere at that moment.

With gambling there is a responsibility also placed on those businesses to reduce profiting from addicts so they are expected to follow procedures to help stop them gambling.

There are many instances of banks contacting potential victims of scams advising them not to proceed and the person insists it's OK or the bank takes the decision not to proceed and they're threatened with legal action.

That is such a vile comment.

You think that the elderly, the vulnerable, those with learning difficulties should be removed from society through "natural selection"? What do you think should happen to them if they have no money left because they have been scammed? Starve to death? Freeze in their homes? Some other form of "natural selection."

I assume you have a. never made a mistake in your life and b. have never known or loved anyone who falls into those categories.

Not everyone is completely savvy and some scams are incredibly sophisticated. Don't be a dick and assume it's only down to carelessness or ignorance.

Of course people who get scammed should be protected. Happy for a teeny tiny % of my mortgage interest to pay for that.

The scammers can be very sophisticated. Don’t pride yourself that you definitely couldn’t fall for one, that’s not true.

They generally are not, its an idea we put about to convince ourselves its not our fault if we fall for them, but the vast majority of scams are not even slightly sophisticated. People will send money to the most obvious, easily spotted scams, you would not believe how easy it is to part some people from their money.

I'm about as confident as I can be that I'm never going to fall for a scam. It would have to be something new and very very sophisticated and I've never seen anything I might concieveably fall for (I've worked in this area)

I'd rather we pay towards the modest millions for vulnerable adults to recover their savings from scam artists, than the billions creamed out of us in interest rate scamming by the banks and past financial crash bail outs (whilst still paying out monstrous bonuses), which we will no doubt be propping up again as banks have over lent for mortgages AGAIN and that may come home to roost very soon as the early 2022 mortgage deals expire. :/

But that is completely different - someone actually living with you and acting like a partner vs someone you’ve never met.

Surely you see that?

I would be unhappy to have to subsidise her fantasies so if she chose to give him the money with no-one twisting her arm or holding her granny to ransom then so be it. Being naive and being 'vulnerable' are not the same, 'vulnerable' is one of words used to try and shut down a discussion.

I think the op has a point. The comparison with gambling holds up.

I watch a lot of these 'Catfish' type programmes, as I'm very aware that I, as a single 60-something homeowner who is occasionally lonely, could be prey. But a lot of people who aren't very tech-savvy have never heard of catfishing, and take things at face value, plus these scammers are clever, working from a 'bible' (which tells them what to say in every circumstance) and have a lot of experience at getting money out of people.

So I think that there should be far more done to educate people in how romance scammers operate, as well as banks making them aware BEFORE they send money to accounts that often don't even have the name of their 'fiance' on them. Prevention is the answer, most banks won't reimburse if they can show that they've done 'due diligence' by alerting a customer to a likely fraud. It's sad, but when someone has been told repeatedly by a bank that the money they are sending is going to a scam account, and yet they still choose to send it - then whose fault is it, really?

YANBU
Hacking and things should be refunded when it’s no fault of the individual, but ‘I willingly transferred my life savings to a man I had never met and now he’s stood me up at our wedding’ is utterly ridiculous. Personal responsibility springs to mind.

YABU if you believe that if the banks didn't have to pay out for scam money they would pay you more interest on your savings 🙄

Do the banks ever go after the scammer to recover the money, does anybody know?

My MIL, who is now dead, was so close to being caught by a scammer. She found it really upsetting and didn’t want her own money anymore as she blamed herself. She was elderly and trusted what she thought was a bank employee. Her account had £2k in it, so nothing like these big sums in the op. When she was dying and out of it on lots of drugs, she was having hallucinations that people were stealing from her. Imagine scamming and traumatising someone so much that their dying thoughts are about getting robbed. Awful.

perhaps op it would help you to think of these people as victims of crime, rather than people who made a bad decision. Yes ok they did make a bad decision, but they did it in good faith having been tricked.

Another lover of bingo cards! None of these 'reasons' should make the banks liable for stupidity.