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

Can we agree those scammed because they were being greedy or thinking they were facilitating transfers of huge amounts from Princes should not get anything back.
The two most effective way to scam someone is through emotional connection, for example I need urgent medical treatment, or through playing to their greedy nature. You gave to sympathise with an emotional scam as we can all end up there, but the greedy can suck it up as far as I am concerned.

Seemed normal? You do know that mental or emotional disorders or past traumas are invisible conditions don't you? I mean we don't know for sure if she had something like that but we wouldn't tell by looking! Same with neurodivergent issues.

@Raisinganiguana - my actual question is, why would you rather refund someone whose phone is nicked because they had it hanging out of their pocket than refund someone who has been groomed by a fraudster?

We all bail out the banks when they fuck up the world economy with demonstrations of incredible greed, recklessness and stupidity, but if you fall victim to romance fraud, then you deserved it, you idiot. 😏

I fell for a scam two weeks before I had my baby this year, where someone called up claiming to be Nationwide reporting fraud on my account - be it baby brain or having my guard down from doing stressful phone calls all of that morning, but I fell for it. Had £1400 of money I’d been saving up by working overtime, selling stuff of mine to build up a baby fund. I was very grateful for the bank refunding me because unfortunately the people who commit this kind of fraud can be quite clever, your guard may just be down, it happens. I’m definitely not of low intelligence and am generally quite savvy. I don’t know what I would have done if the bank had said ‘yeah you shouldn’t have fallen for that, no money back sorry, you’re the idiot’.

It all comes down to maintaining consumer confidence (a hard sell, tbh, given the mess the world has been in since the last global economic crash caused by banks’ reckless behaviour). The banking system is based on trust - trust by consumers that their money is looked after by the banks as the money experts and that banks can be trusted with money. If banks are allowing fraudsters to open accounts for fraudulent purposes and then disappear into the ether with the money, then the banks are facilitating fraud. The system of money being moved around the world quite so easily was never designed with the everyday consumer in mind - it’s designed to facilitate world trade and to enable the financial markets to make massive profits, including out of the savings of ordinary people. Vast amounts of money are made, stolen and hidden via banking transactions. Rather than slow down the pace of profit-making transactions, and have a close eye kept on their activities by regulators who might insist on more onerous checks and security, banks have agreed to take the hit when the little people lose some small change (from the bank’s point of view). Rather that than eat into their real profits by keeping a close eye on everything else they get up to - worth it if it maintains the trust of the little people.

As someone who had a lot of trouble convincing my ex that no, his favourite actor wasn't messaging him on Facebook Messenger offering him a job writing scripts for his show (and by the way could he have some iTunes cards), I relate so much to that comment. I managed to talk my ex out of asking his family for a loan to pay customs fees on a non existent package stuck in Thailand (I don't think the family would have paid it) but I think he still believes there was really a job and I stopped it because I didn't want him to succeed.

Gamblers don't get manipulated to do that neither do drug addicts
Love scams take months of emotional manipulation

"we all" don't pay for it the banks insurance does and no I don't agree with you, not only "old people " are vunerable
Women get scammed by partners they known for years

They charge what they can get away with.

These are multinational scams often involving enslaved people facilitated by social media platforms and utilising the banks' own mechanisms. These private companies including banks need to be putting in controls, not shifting the blame onto their own customers when they lose money to fraud enabled by banking mechanisms.

institutions don’t have money, people pay for everything. If the bank’s costs go up, they charge more for their services so the other customers pay for it. If, in the unlikely event they did not pass the cost onto other customers (and therefore make less profit) than the shareholders pay for if through lower dividends and / lower capital appreciation. The shareholders will be in part, pension funds, so retired people ‘pay’ through getting less money in their pensions.

This.

People don’t understand how big a difference billion is from million.

A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years.

Romance fraud is one of the cruellest crimes I have come across.
The victims are groomed. There are so many emotions tied up in it. They have to cope with the shame of being scammed, mourning the relationship that never was, summon up the courage to report it and be judged for their actions. I don't begrudge the few victims that do get their money back.
Fraud is a much undereported crime. Fraudsters thrive on people judging the victims - it means they don't report it and there's even less chance of the scammers being caught. I choose to save my scorn for the criminals.

No, your assertion you would rather refund a nicked mobile than someone who fell victim to romance fraud. Or did you not read your own post, despite it being quoted in full for you?

It allowed them to preach from their high horse whilst patting themselves on the back for being better than the posters they were arguing with. That speech was platitudinous pap and not the gold of nugget of wisdom they wanted to portray.

I've met dozens of kind idiots. And some very, very clever rogues.

I don't know if this will be helpful to anyone but last year DH and I moved our bank accounts to another bank. It's well-established and based in Sweden, but the customer service is a step up from the UK High Street banks. And it should be, the charges are higher too. But you have a named person, that you meet face to face, and a direct line. If you need anything sorted, a phone call is all it takes.

Cloning is to do with a weakness in banking technology (it used to be because the card retained an unnecessary magnetic strip which could be copied) so damn right the bank are responsible for making sure I don't lose out (it's up to them if they want to pursue the thief, I wish they would) scamming or phishing require a customer's participation. I have sympathy with people who are caught out by maybe a slightly different font in an email address but the usual rules (like NEVER revealing passwords or PIN numbers) do tend to protect us from a lot. I have no sympathy for the woman described here because she clearly thought she knew better than the thousands of people who have been scammed before her.

In her last few years, I exercised the PoA for my DMIL albeit with her DC/my DH's blessing. She was well past responding to anything sent via email, but might have been vulnerable to anything sent by first class post. And TBF, every time I paid the care home she lived in, NatWest asked me to consider whether the payment could be fraudulent, even though we paid two care homes (sequentially) for three years. I don't think she would have done anything worse than sign a direct debit in favour of a doggie charity for £5 monthly, but we all have to be very cautious. The first rule is, if it sounds wonderful (you're rich or you're loved) it's almost certainly a fraud.

It took years to persuade banks to do a check that the account you're transferring money to belongs to the person it should.It's still not compulsory. Some banks don't do' and the accounts of their customers can't be checked. So you have occasions when you have transfer money even though the bank hasn't declared it a match.

If banks were more proactiv checking account number and name match, I might have more sympathy.

Maybe if you get your card cloned and money taken out of it you could tell the bank that you don't need them to repay your account as it wasn't really their fault?

Or you could see that one of the few perks of loaning a bank your hard earned cash for them to make massive profits is the insurance you get if you're scammed, phished or cloned.

Judging others on the basis of a basic summary, when their reality was months of the criminal getting to know them, drip feeding a story to them, testing out what works on them, finding out their insecurities, learning all about their hopes and dreams, is just being crass and not even trying to understand why they might have ended up looking and behaving like an easily manipulated fool.

That may well be true but I still don't see how it's the bank's fault.

They groom their victims, like people traffickers might well have done, or sex abusers. Do you also take this attitude to women who form relationships with men who then rape and humiliate them?

All of that is awful but no-one expects a bank to be responsible for compensating those victims so why is a bank responsible for compensating the woman described here? In my experience banks go out of their way to warn people about possible scams when you try to make a payment on line. They are constantly telling customers never to give out bank details and passwords over the phone and OTP have made buying online safer than ever. Banks are simply the method by which the money gets to the scammer and they try pretty hard to make people stop and think before they make the payments.

A pp mentioned the compensation you can get if a company you've purchased from goes bust and you paid by credit card. I've never understood the logic of that either (and never used it).