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

A couple of years ago my daughter got scammed by phone when she was 18, they took over 6k - all her pocket money and birthday/christmas gifts she had saved for a few years, which she was putting towards university. Fortunately she did get it back but the fallout was devastating, it robbed a lot of her self confidence.
It can happen to anyone and the scammers can be very convincing, some are so arrogant, they even tried to double dip her and rang again, only this time they got me! I was not nice!
Show empathy folks, the banks pay out of their profits, not your pockets - money they were never going to allow to trickle down to saving rates.

from October 2024 the person will be refunded if they have been scammed. The cost paid 50/50 by the sending and receiving bank.

I think it’s nuts and open to abuse.

when trying to make a payment from a tsb account it gives about a million warnings before setting up a new recipient.

people need to take a wee bit or responsibility for themselves

How is it different to all shoppers paying for losses due to shoplifting???

Well obviously they can't all be spotted very easily because they generate tens of billions for the arms/drugs dealers and people traffickers who run them, every year. If it were so very easy to spot them nobody would bother kidnapping Indian/Bangladeshi/Nigerian computer programmers and forcing them to spend 20 hours a day whispering sweet virtual nothings to women in Hull with £30k in savings. As long as there are enormous loopholes in international banking systems it's a tried and tested business model for fundraising for your average oligarch/warlord/despot. Bigger returns than gofundme and a lot less scrutiny.

Maybe we should all be asking why banks aren't stopping transactions where the initial transfer account is set up to ping funds across a chain of multiple destinations including tax havens and via multiple aliases including persons who don't exist before landing in shell companies with random residential addresses and then being cleaned out to fund the next round of barbarism and mayhem in whichever tinpot hellhole the true receiving party does 'business' in.

Personally I’m really pleased that we live in a world where vulnerable people are supported. Scams are crimes to which people fall victim and which can ruin lives.

@Stressedmum1966 make a formal complaint to the bank stating mums age and any other vulnerabilities, advise you will contact the Financial Ombudsman if they don't refund the money stolen. If the Bank still decline to refund contact the Financial Ombudsman.

They don’t necessarily reimburse. My elderly mum got scammed 2 weeks ago for £15K and the bank won’t reimburse!

It’s chicken and egg though, isn’t it? The banks never bothered to warn people until they were told they had to and that they would be obliged to pay customers back if they were not considered to have been robust enough with their warnings. The people foolhardy enough to admit to their stupidity are the tip of the iceberg - the fact is, a high proportion of people actually are financially and emotionally stupid and the banks happily let them be so on a daily basis. You only have to look at the amount of successful fraud on Facebook Marketplace, the number of people who share naked photographs of themselves, the number of people who believe incredible conspiracy stories on the internet, the number of people who believe Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are geniuses. Your stupid is another person’s normal, but because people don’t actually believe they are stupid, they don’t always believe the scam warnings apply to them.

It turns out everyone can be an idiot after all, with bankers themselves winning the top prize for idiocy, because they lost so much money the global financial markets nearly went into total meltdown and the world has become increasingly unstable ever since. At least romance fraud isn’t on the scale of destabilising the world order.

Nobody has 100% insight, and we all have blind spots, but come on! Most of these scams can be seen by a blind woman, from 20miles away.

We've all got issues, its not a get out of jail free card. I do have sympathy, but implying these people lack agency helps nothing.

@babetyouknow depends how you define disability. Someone may have no diagnosis but had a background of childhood trauma and have deep unmet emotional needs so can be unusually trusting and naive when it comes to love. Of course these people do have intellectual capacity so of course they do bear some responsibility but I wonder if they have 100% insight into their actions . I would consider such people to be disabled in the sense of having an undiagnosed emotional problem.

I don't think disability is always a black and white thing unless you are talking about severe cognitive impairments or extreme psychosis where this would be considered not just medically but legally lacking capacity e.g. Dementia, the psychotic stage of schizophrenia, manic stage of bipolar type 1, or IQ below 65. Many issues like personality disorders, attachment issues, abandonment issues, complex ptsd etc are more nuanced.

That's true of course, but people are so willing to get themselves into it, despite so many warnings. Unless they have actual disabilities that prevent them being able to manage their own affairs, many of them really need to take some responsibility.

It's not someone having a bad day and an incredibly sophisticated scam, its someone actively colluding in their own fraud.

Specific to romance scams - I think education is the best defence. I watch Social Catfish and it's astonishing how repetitive many of the situations, phraseology and people are. Just making people aware that if a person uses some or any of these phrases or claims, you might want to do a reverse Google search of their image to check they are who they say they are might go some way to preventing them.

I know they won't prevent all scams because the scammers are so clever that they can manipulate their way around explanations for every single one of them being a widowed ex surgeon with one son who is currently working on an oil rig in the middle east, but the more it's talked about and examined and made public then the less likely it is that people will fall for it. It's shame that keeps so many of these scammers in business, people are too ashamed to admit that, yes, they really did believe that that gorgeous rich American man fell for their overweight, poor and badly dressed selves. But once we do away with that shame, so people aren't ashamed to admit they fell for this scam, we might go some way to preventing it in others.

And also, incidentally, finding out that losses to scammers are way, WAY higher than we know at present.

The thing is @babetyouknow most people haven’t been trained in cybersecurity and as @Oyen says these scammers are targeting multiple people until they find the fragile, susceptible one. And then I’m pretty sure it isn’t “hi Fatty from Felixstowe, it’s Pierre from Paris here, I love you, send me £10,000”. They build up “relationships” over time.

At certain times people are vulnerable. And like a bit of flattery. This is what is preyed on. Read I Do Not Come To You By Chance by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani.

No doubt it’s far more cost effective for the banks to just reimburse the money than to sort out and follow just where the money has gone.

that's different. And did they get their money back?

Do you think people are saying that all fraud is the same?

And what about the people who were victims of Anna Delvey and Elizabeth Holmes? Some of the people giving lots of their money were highly esteemed members of society, tech savvy etc…

Saved me writing it.

They have systems that don't work. Money laundering happens all the time. This is one example of it.

Hmmm but the sixth commandment scam didn’t happen online and it was all a very slow burn… I think scammers are very innovative and adaptable in their behaviours, I’d rather be more aware of how I could be targeted then think it would never happen to me, because they will adapt their techniques. I don’t think I’d ever be a target but then I don’t know, they are pretty sophisticated, and psychological manipulation can happen to anyone… Although if I don’t talk or communicate with anyone ever then I guess it would be hard to be a victim of a scam!

banks have many complex anti money laundering systems. Doesn’t mean that they can stop people giving their money away.

They could check where the bloody money is going is what they could do. Like actually check, trace through the layering etc.

These "scammers" aren't single guys lying about who they are. They are organisations who use forced/slave labour to get huge amounts of people - thousands of people - to set up fake profiles and spend 20 hours a day communicating with victims using scripts that utilise coercive control and other manipulative techniques. If the communicators don't bring in enough money, they are beaten or worse. The money is funnelled into illegal enterprises to fund anything from terrorism, human trafficking to drugs trade, mercenary activity and the like. And it's funnelled using the banks' own channels.

What your husband does or doesn't get up to in auction houses is irrelevant. Banks are happy enough to have systems in place that make it easier than ever for the worst kind of people to get a hold of large sums of money and move it around very quickly. Not just with these scams but with other multi layered transactions that fund misery, enslavement and death on a massive scale. The very least they could do is refund money to any poor schmuck who gets temporarily caught in a tiny part of this huge network.

There’s controls and there’s refunding people who send their money to an obvious fraudster. People need to take responsibility for themselves

No I don't think I'd be susceptible to a romance scam either, all the love bombing would be a complete turn off and I'm naturally cynical about people who I don't know that well/strangers online. I don't even do PM on here, not interested in one to one interactions with strangers.

I think it's useful to keep up to date with other scams doing the rounds (like the child WA one or fake texts from parcel delivery companies) because then you're less likely to act in a panic.

That’s not the case. Banks are in a competitive market in the uk that limits the profits they can make. Fraud losses are paid for by all of us.

No, I can categorically tell you that I could never be a victim of a romance scam. I do know how I would respond.
I'm a crabby old bitch who dislikes almost everyone, trusts almost no-one, and has been trained in cybersecurity since the term was invented.
there is literally no moment that I could be caught by a romance scam.

I haven't been a victim of a scam like this. However I used to think I would never make loads of mistakes I subsequently made. You don't know how you will respond until you are in these situations. And the scammers target people at their lowest ebb when their defences are down. I think anyone could be a victim if caught at the wrong moment.