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

[Raisinganiguana]

I’m watching Steph’s Packed Lunch and there’s a woman on there who sadly got romance scammed for £30k. Afterwards, the financial expert was really clear that if this happens to you, the banks have to give you your money back. He even said they can’t ‘weasel’ out of it.

I’m sorry for the lady, but why should everyone else pay for what is essentially someone choosing to give someone else money? We don’t pay people back if they gamble it away, so why do we demand it just because they’ve fallen for a story?

She wasn’t someone very old or vulnerable. She chose to send this man money.

btw the scammer’s story was ridiculous - and the man’s photos were actually of some super hot model - so how one falls for these is another thing….especially as there are back to back warnings everywhere and on every bloody programme nowadays.

AIBU that people need to take some responsibility?

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.

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.

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.

@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.

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.

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.

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

@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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I’m not sure whether they should be paid back really you can sometimes feel for them, I love watching things like this though I can’t believe how daft people can be. Even if I’d met a real person and his dog had a big vet bill I wouldn’t be paying lol 😂

I don’t begrudge the victims having their money back, but this should extend to other types of fraud, like scamming builders or rental scams.

To be honest, I agree with you in a lot of cases OP. There's so much education out there and so much friction put into payment journeys that I find it unbelievable that people don't stop and think.

Unfortunately with the new mandatory reimbursement code coming in, it's only going to get worse because banks are going to be forced to reimburse every Tom, Dick and Harry even if they did blithely ignore multiple warnings. Including warnings from branch staff for all those who like to go on about that.

There is going to be a clause to not refund "gross negligence" however and I'd rather hope romance scams might come under that.

I tend to agree with this. Some scams are very sophisticated, and anyone could be fooled, but in a case such as this it is quite clearly a ruse to get money, and the people involved often forge ahead with giving the money, despite warnings from others.

I had a friend who this could easily have happened to, and it only didn't because she had no money - and funnily enough this wonderful, wealthy, good looking, man disappeared as soon as he realised this. We repeatedly told her to be careful, but would she listen?

If I had a gambling issue, or a drug problem, would the banks reimburse me any money I spent on my habit? People do have to take some responsibilty for their choices. I'm sure I read about a case (not in the UK) recently where someone had been scammed by men promising romance for either the second or third time and was not happy that the bank refused to refund her. Where does it end?

I agree, I hadn't thought about it from that angle, but yes. So many people lose money through no fault of their own and never see it again, but people who lose money due to their own foolishness are entitled to be refunded?? That is just wrong.

I have never seen any evidence that people with “computer science degrees” are kidnapped for these scams. They don’t require any particular expertise.

and the bank nonsense is a silly question- banks just transfer to the next account in line. It’s very difficult now to open a bank account in most countries in your own name- never mind “multiple aliases who don’t exist”. And “tax havens” are just countries with lower tax rates - many have more stringent money laundering regulations than the uk (I’ve worked in finance in several). So in short, there’s no truth in what you say.

Actually this is not always correct. If a gambling establishment failed to identify gambling addictions or the person's affordability then yes they too can be forced to pay back.

The powers that be appear to have a better understanding of human psychology than the randoms of Mumsnet on this one, then.

, because any savings made would definitelybe given back to customers, instead of creamed off for shareholders…..

shareholders are people too, and rely on profit to survive. However my take on the refund thing is that in days gone by, pre Internet banking, you had to go along to the bank and pre arrange large withdrawals, now its a couple of button presses and you can send money anywhere.

That banks have to refund, encourages them to put in as many safeguards as they can and cooperate with investigations. It also sort of balances out this ease of scam compared to previous in person transactions.

But do people have to have some self responsibility, yes they do, but maybe the refund should be minus 20% if not a vulnerable person. That to me would seem fairer.

people don’t actually believe they are stupid

Yet many people do stupid things, like trusting Internet randoms, not reading their bank statements closely and getting pregnant with unreliable men. Don't be too smug, we can all have lapses of judgement, and some may be seriously bad news.

Even young and intelligent people can be duped, manipulated, scared, coerced into believing things that aren’t true.
I think your irritation is misplaced, be irritated by the people who run these scams not the people who fall for them.
I would rather live in a society that helps those in need regardless of what that need is or how they got there than one who tells people ‘gutted your fault’