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

someone was so lonely that they wanted to believe it was true.

This is itself a form of vulnerability.

People can collude to fake other kinds of crimes, like burglary. We don't assume that burglary victims are lying though.

@Raisinganiguana yes of course I read your post. How is it not a financial scam? She lost so much money. It is a type of financial scam, just in the form of a supposed romance The woman was totally silly in this case I agree. I feel sorry that someone was so lonely that they wanted to believe it was true.

I got fooled by one of those. Thankfully, PayPal reversed the transaction.

Anyone can put up a convincing website using off-the-shelf storefront software. Perhaps the answer will be that we all revert to shopping in physical stores?

I think getting the money compensated will encourage more scams. The scammers get the money, the scamned get their money back and its just the banks to lose out. People will be even more careless.

It’s simply not true that you are guaranteed your money back if you’ve been scammed.

Certainly a fraud department will investigate, but if you haven’t done due diligence, if you haven’t heeded the warnings regarding sending money to scammers then the banks aren’t obliged to give you back your money.

I know someone who was scammed out of £60000 by a romance scammer. She didn’t get a penny back. The banks had in some instances even blocked payments, and she had spoken to them to say that this was someone she knew personally and the payment was legit.

There are some scams that I can see would be easy to fall for. The one where you’re messaged to say you need to rearrange delivery of a package. If you’re expecting a package then I can see how you might fall for that, given it’s only a few quid, or so you think.

But these romance scams are public knowledge by now. And they’re not even plausible. Stuck on an oil rig/being held hostage/being threatened and the person being scammed has never even met them.

There absolutely needs to be a level of personal responsibility here.

As for the Canadian lottery and the Nigerian prince scams, I have no sympathy for anyone who falls for them, because the reality is that their motivation here is greed.

If you haven’t bought a ticket for the Canadian lottery then you know you can’t have won.

And anyone stupid enough to fall for an email asking you to launder money through your bank account so you’ll receive millions of pounds has no-one to blame but themselves.

Natwest distributed £1bn in dividends last year on a profit of over £12bn . Figure for Barclays was £1.02bn on a profit of £5bn. HSBC made a profit of over £16bn.

This is just 3 banks. Collective profit is £33,000,000,000. That's 33 thousand million pounds.

Yet some on this thread think that all of the banks (not just these three) having to stump up for £92m of fraud this year is too much to ask, and that we all pay for it. Pathetic.

And you seem to be rather ill mannered.

We trust them with our money, so yes. And they have obligations to their customers to repay that trust.

No they aren't, you seem pretty naive.

You're missing the point. In many cases, something bad didn't randomly happen to them. They actively engaged in it.

the person who gives there bank details to someone on an email because they are told they've won a huge lottery in spain or something, which they know they didn't enter, is trying to gain money for nothing. They're a scammer same as the scammers scamming them!

The granny giving some young waiter in Morocco all her money because she slept with him on holiday is trying to exploit him as much as he's trying to exploit her.

Stop pretending everyone was just going about their business and scammers took all their money. In most cases, they gave it away. Yes, there is manipulation and there is vulnerability, but its inane to suggest people aren't helping to cause their own misfortune.

What legal scams? Scams in all their guises are illegal. I’m not sure why addictions are being compared to victims of crime tbh.

Collusion is exactly what I thought of when I saw the OP. If there’s a way to make money people will use it. Just look at the massive fraud from the Covid payments scheme.
A few months of texting a contact overseas and building a story and split the profits. Easy money!

Apologies if this has already been mentioned but today's You and Yours on R4 had a long section about sophisticated scams, and one in which the bank took every precaution to warn the customer about going ahead, to the point where they made her upload a selfie with a printed signed letter saying she was sending her (life) savings for investment in crypto-currency. The bank has refused to refund a penny of the £85k she/they lost. We'll probably see more of this. But the message is: not all frauds and scams are automatically refunded and increasingly less likely to be refunded.

Funny - some are much more prepared to compensate people who are scammed than people who are mugged.

It's a strange world we live in where people start turning on others who have the misfortune to have something bad happen to them. And why? Because we feel that they are responsible for taking money away from us.

You see I once saw an interview with an ex policeman who managed to lose his life savings to a scammer. And because he was a DCI it was a pretty penny.

Now I am not saying that if I was in charge I might have wanted all his cases reviewed. That's for others to say.

I've heard tell that banks and credit cards clear off debts of people who are psychotic / manic.

Also, most people can get large debts written off without having to repay them, one way or another. And you don't see people going to prison for deliberately running up huge debts and loans (in their own name).

A wise friend of mine once told me that this is a deliberate policy of the banks to never appear to act punitively in order to maintain the trust and custom of the general public.

Yes but what difference does that make? It's an arbitrary distinction. The outcome is the exact same. If you really care about vulnerable people, why do you only care about those who lose money from illegal scams and not legal scams? What is the ACTUAL difference? There isn;t any.

You either care about vulnerable people losing money, or you don't. You can't care about one arbitrary grouping and not another.

Yes but that's just a saying with no bearing on reality....surely you absolutely can cheat an honest man (or woman) - I'm sure it's been proven many times.

I wonder how people who say you are not being unreasonable view, say, claims through credit cards for compensation when they don't receive what they ordered? In that situation do you just say "No, I won't claim, because it's a risk I chose to take in ordering from this iffy company, and if I claim the banks will put their charges up"? Somehow I doubt it.

Just making the point that you seem devoid of empathy. You'd have to view the link I posted to see what some think that might make you. Not saying you are as I don't know you, but the idea that a £92m payout by all the UK banks might have a knock-on effect on savings interest or mortgage rates is laughable.

On the other hand there's a traditional saying:

'You can't cheat an honest man.'

Often, people who are victims can be victim of their own greed or dishonesty because they're being offered something at knock down price or that bends the rules.

With romance scams it's heartbreaking if the person isn't too sharp or is badly affected by loneliness and they're desperate for love. My mother was very vulnerable due to mental illness and she would get herself into awful entanglements with either predatory men or other very unwell men. Luckily she never actually got scammed although one nearly took her home over! So I do have empathy.

Of course we pay for it. Banks need to increase fees etc to cover the cost. They do not take the hit, their customers do.

Rather takes away any incentive to learn then ....