Just got scammed out of almost 1k

[BonneMamanAbricot]

Please be so careful of phone calls from your bank. Always call them back, as caller ID can be faked. My actual bank said they had never seen this scam. They duplicated everything, all the spiels, the robot connecting voice, the hold music.

Second month of being paid after 5 months of no income. Back to nothing again. FFS.

You should really challenge this, a similar thing happened to my husband and the bank closed the case very quickly.

I went onto the Financial Ombudsman’s website and looked at the case studies on there, and what happened to my husband was virtually identical to one of their case studies where the money was refunded in full. It took a few weeks but after writing to the Ombudsman, he was refunded in full.

Nearly £1,000 to the banks is nothing so even though you/my husband got caught out, the banks should have blocks and fraud alerts in place to stop this happening (which was one the arguments I put forward which the Ombudsman agreed with).

@pinkstripeycat my back did call me. They knew my purse had been stolen before I did! They didn’t asked for any details. Just questioned a couple of transactions.

I sincerely hope this never happens to you - my husband got caught out when his mom was in a coma in hospital following an operation on her brain tumour, and he was in the garden looking after our two young children whilst running on empty.

It could happen to anyone and the reality is amounts like this are peanuts to banks, but have a material impact on people’s lives. You should try having some empathy…

That simply isn’t true. My husband got a call from the bank, and so did my son.

They can’t. The OP authorised some sort of pass code as well.

The narrative about it being "a new scam" and the money being irretrievable sounds dicey to me. Are you 100% sure you were talking to your bank. I only say as I've heard of 2 cases lately where calls made to a legitimate number from the bank's website were intercepted (by staying on the line or some other means). OP suggest you talk to the bank again on a different number to secure your account.

I work in business finance and it's not true that banks never call you, Santander in particular do it all the time. These sort of scams are ever so common and easy to fall for.

I overheard a relative receive one of these calls. Luckily relative realised and didn't give the code, but it was incredibly convincing and legitimate sounding - I can totally understand why OP might not have noticed, sadly

But that's just not true. My bank have called me twice in the last year to confirm transactions on my account were genuine. On both occasions they were and the bank after initially freezing my account then release the hold and let the transactions process.

So sorry this happened. They are getting so smart, I had a scammer pretending to call from HSBC, they nearly got me because I did cal HSBC that same day and wondered if they were calling to clarify something. They even did a verification check with me and it was quite similar to HSBC real one but as I just called them that day I remembered they didn’t ask it the exact same way. They even tried to reassure me when I was sceptical and said to call hsbc on a number I felt comfortable with, I googled the number though and it came up as a known scammer.

Your bank wouldn’t call you, they def wouldn’t verify you by your account number/ sort code etc, it would be your usual telephone banking password which even the banker wouldn’t hear, it would be the robot asking for those details at the beginning of the call.

I think it’s rare for banks these days to call. It’s best to call them back on their customer service number just to be sure.

I had the exact same thing happen but clicked when they asked for the verification code and hung up. I think this is a pretty common scam, but when they make it look like the call is coming from your bank’s phone number etc it can be very convincing!

The narrative about “your bank will never call you” is half the sentence. Your bank will never call you to ask for a OTP, PIN, password etc. Your bank may well call you to raise concerns about fraudulent transactions but they will ask you to go through security ie selected letters from your password, not give out all your details direct to the caller. And the OTP code that is sent to your mobile and you tell the caller is literally you allowing the scammer to verify the purchase they are making on your card.

sorry you got scammed OP, the thing they do so well is the pressure and urgency which is what makes sensible people fall for this stufff.

sorry OP but if my bank called snd asked me
to manually transfer £1k i wouldnt do it

why did you think it was genuine?

Here speaks the milk of human kindness.

Banks do occasionally call you just ignore and don't answer, I block all these unknown calls anyway.

QR code scams in carparks have been warned about on the BBC, there have been warnings about certain carparks in the news. Do not use QR codes in carparks, lots of people get scammed by these.

Well you're a treat! I work in a bank and yes while some scams seem obvious to people on the outside, in that moment to the customer they are not. The scammers rely on panicking people, then rushing them so they make mistakes. They call with the number showing as your banks number, they will quite often have an accent local to where the banks call centre is based. People are naive, yes, but they do no deserve to lose their money to these criminals for being naive. I'm not sure why you think our taxes will pay for this, it's nothing to do with tax. The banks pay for the fraud out of their profits this is why they spend millions on fraud systems.

Who do you bank with? If you've been scammed then you should get your money back.

I agree I would wonder what bank you are with as this is a well known scam. If you are not sure the best number to safely call your banks fraud team, call 159. Most banks are signed up to it and it will safely connect you.

Ok well they might call you on rare cases but they will encourage you to call them back on legitimate numbers on their website if you are unsure. They also will never ask for a full username/ pin/ account number or card number, they already would know all of this info if they are legit so won’t ever need it. What they normally do is ask for random letters from your password or you would go through the robot at the beginning and use your voice password.

I honestly can't believe in this day and age people are accepting calls from their bank and not just politely putting the phone down and ringing the bank themselves on the proper number if they are concerned about the call, we are constantly being warned about this.

Awful you’ve been scammed, I’m shocked the bank can’t do anything to get your money back- I’d still keep on at them/take it further must be so upset.
Ask your back for it to be escalated and that you want a full written explanation for the reasons it’s being denied.
Report to the police and get a crime number to attach to the case. (I know they won’t do anything but it’ll strengthen your case).
Report to Action Fraud.

I’ll be sure to pass this post on to my mum, aunt and in-laws as I can see them falling for it.

These scammers are super sophisticated these days. I luckily live literally about ten mins from our city centre branch so if I were to ever receive such an emergency call from the bank I'd just put the phone down and march straight up to the bank and do whatever needs doing in person. It's another reason why it's really important they don't close down branches.

Exactly this. I was scammed once and the bank just put the money back, I don't know if they were able to retrieve it or not, but they put it straight back into my account.

The thing is both my dh and I have received calls from our banks (hsbc and Lloyd’s) to say our accounts were at risk of fraudulent transactions.

Rang back on a recognised number to verify.

If you have online banking check that first. You’ll see there’s nothing alarming going on there.