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?

There are many instances of banks contacting potential victims of scams advising them not to proceed and the person insists it's OK or the bank takes the decision not to proceed and they're threatened with legal action.

Bad day at work when fall for scam and lose employer Kent hairbrushes . £1.6m and banks don't refund businesses nor its seems do much to trace fraudsters but guess is even less incentive when no loss to their profits.

I'm not sure it's easy to tell who the vulnerable people are as an outsider, perhaps if they fall for these romance scams they should also get some sort of social/health check up.
I'm quite savvy but still nearly put my details into one of the parcel scams as I was awaiting a parcel and was tired/stressed my mind was elsewhere at that moment.

With gambling there is a responsibility also placed on those businesses to reduce profiting from addicts so they are expected to follow procedures to help stop them gambling.

The reason the banks pay you back is that they should have better anti scam protections in place and they don't!

I hope you never get scammed op! It can literally happen to anyone now as the scammers are becoming much more sophisticated.

I bet when you are scammed ( and you will be) you will be grateful this process exists. However if you are philosophically opposed you can then hand back the money !

I’ve worked in this area too. I also now work in an area requiring knowledge of human psychology. The scammers play on people’s psychological weak spots and leverage common psychological responses. Some people are more vulnerable than others, for sure. But that doesn’t mean those people should just be thrown to the wolves.

The warnings aren’t meant to change customer behaviour. They’re intended to push responsibility away from the bank and on to the customer

Yes or a lower savings rate because believe it or nor banks compete for customers

The banks have set up processes that are vulnerable to fraud for their own financial gain. They need to treat the financial downsides of that as business costs.

Banks have a duty of care and should be able to prevent vulnerable customers from transferring their life savings to strangers.

They do. But anyone who has ever paid any money to anyone knows that first there's the check to confirm that the account name matches what you've put in, and then the app or website will ask you what the payment is for. You are warned about scams and fraud before making the transfer.

You cannot protect people against their own stupidity, if they are stupid enough to believe that they are sending money to an American soldier or doctor who just happens to need money to release medical equipment or get his gold bars out of the middle east then you deserve everything you get.

The banks shouldn’t be allowing you to just transfer a load of money to a random in another country like that. They need more security measures in place.

I once had a cheque book intercepted and a man with a name nothing like mine cleared my account with two separate cheques not signed be me, but by a man with a foreign name. They had to reimburse me. But honestly what on earth were they thinking? He went into a branch and just cleared the account. Why did no one think it was a bit odd?

@Stroopwaffels you are wrong. Try and pay money to someone new in a branch and they ask you so many questions. Because they know people who use bank branches tend to be vulnerable. It's not people fault so many branches have closed.
And in branches they make clear that if it is a fraud you will not get your money back. Because there they do proper checks.

Maybe when you do the transfer they need to flash up a picture of a hot guy/ girl driving a Ferrari and it says “ do you think this guy/ girl would be interested in you?” If you say yes it blocks your account and you get sent off for reeducation before you’re trusted with grown up things again.

I got my money back from Netflix when someone in a foreign country upgraded my account and logged into it using an old password that had been leaked by another site. I had never logged into Netflix away from home so a log in from Nigeria and an upgrade should have been automatically blocked and further verification required.
It was right I was reimbursed.

Not sure why they would refund them. My bank won't even refund scams from a registered company

The money is usually long gone into another account, possibly abroad. It is often moved into one or several other accounts within minutes of being paid. Scammers often takeover existing accounts that someone no longer wants. There are people who will actually sell their dormant account or allow a scammer to use it for a fee so it's not a simple case of making it harder to open an account to stop them.
Fraud costs a hell of a lot more than £92m a year. In the first half of 2022 it was circa £610m but obviously that's not all romance fraud. And banks fraud prevention systems prevented another £584m. In that period £140.1m was returned to victims of push payment fraud.

@Sparehair in branch they ask you how you know this person. Where did you meet them. How long have you known them. How did they give you details of your bank account.
I am I suspect flagged as vulnerable because I have sight loss. But they don't just say oh you want to transfer money let me do it. And they do make clear if you lie or transfer against their advice you can't claim money back.
But online banks don't give a shit.

The only reason they ask you so many questions in the branch about who you are paying is that the money laundering rules are so so tight and stringent for banks. Customers being scammed, nah, they are not so bothered by that!

I'm in two minds.

On the one hand - Banks and other companies who are highly regulated have to have a lot of user training in place - Things like when you're sent an OTP (One time password) and it says in texts 'NEVER TELL THIS TO ANYONE'... and yet people still tell the 'Nice man on the phone' the password as the nice man has phoned up, told the individual they're being hacked and they need to move the money into a 'safe' account until their account is 'better'.

You also get regular emails from companies offering you guidance around security best practices..... landing screens with guidance... even when you're trying to transfer money there are a number of checks that take place and if you override them when a bank says 'The name and account don't match, are you SURE you want to go ahead?' then that's on you.

So maybe pay attention to the guidance, don't just gloss over it and if you think 'Well, it won't happen to me' and it does - take some responsibility for it.

On the other hand - I appreciate that the tactics and approaches used to scam people can be incredibly complex and some are exceptionally hard to spot - for example, if you're buying a house and get an email from your 'solicitors' telling you that they've changed their bank account and please pay your stamp duty into a different account... and it turns out that the solicitors have had a BEC (Business Email Compromise) - and you've just transferred £££££ into some random persons bank account. Is that your fault? The solicitors fault?

I have sympathy for certain individuals who get scammed - not others, however to distinguish between them is impossible.

There's a few interesting Youtubers I watch - Kitboga / Scammer Payback / Social Catfish - all of them talk you through a lot of the common scams used whether it's romance catfishing / Microsoft Virus scamming etc....It's interesting to see what's being used in various parts of the world.

I didn't actually know you could get your money back for romance scams.

There have been terrible cases like fake pension funds being set up where the banks were pretty awful and practically facilitated the fraud.

Jeez @Tiredalwaystired I'm so sorry that happened to you. How devastating for you, emotionally even more than financially I'd imagine. Hope you are on the way to getting over it now and I hope the bank helped you too 💐

If you think a £92m annual cost to banks results in us all paying higher interest rates on debt, or us getting less interest on savings, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.

If you try and find a little more compassion perhaps you may realise this £92m costs us nothing. This thread and some of the responses remind me of the speech given by the Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker. In it he said:

“If you want to be successful in this world, you have to develop your own idiot detection system. The best way to spot an idiot? Look for the person who is cruel,” adding, “When we see someone who doesn't look like us, or sound like us, or act like us, or love like us, or live like us—the first thought that crosses almost everyone's brain is rooted in either fear or judgement or both. That's evolution. We survived as a species by being suspicious of things we aren't familiar with.”
“In order to be kind, we have to shut down that animal instinct and force our brain to travel a different pathway. Empathy and compassion are evolved states of being. They require the mental capacity to step past our most primal urges,” Mr Pritzker explained.
Stressing the importance of being kind, Mr Pritzker added, “I'm here to tell you that when someone's path through this world is marked with acts of cruelty, they have failed the first test of an advanced society. They never forced their animal brain to evolve past its first instinct. They never forged new mental pathways to overcome their own instinctual fears. And so, their thinking and problem-solving will lack the imagination and creativity that the kindest people have in spades… Over my many years in politics and business, I have found one thing to be universally true—the kindest person in the room is often the smartest.”

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/the-graduation-speech-that-is-winning-the-internet-how-to-spot-an-idiot-4162620

I can't imagine living my life this bitter over vulnerable people

made me giggle. As if one discursive thread on a chat site signals living a life bitter and twisted. And over vulnerable people, heaven forbid!!!

YABU to assume vulnerable means wilfully stupid and uneducated. We can all be vulnerable at times, especially when unwell or distressed.

My lovely, highly educated (Professor) and very recently widowed friend was scammed out of €500 and thankfully, the bank repaid the money.

Initially, there were reams of paperwork to complete after her DH’s death and the bank cocked up when closing their former joint accounts and transferring sums to her newly opened current and savings accounts. Some idiot at the bank managed to freeze ALL of her accounts so she couldn’t even buy her food shopping and only discovered the problem when she got to the till. Luckily, I was with her and was able to pay using my card.

A couple of days later, she received a text telling her she owed money for the toll road in Dublin. This is a legitimate fee that is collected online rather than at the barrier and she assumed that her daughter from overseas had used their toll account when she was over for the funeral, so she went ahead and clicked on the link and put in her details to pay it. Luckily (!) she mentioned it to her daughter when she rang her that evening for their daily chat and the DD pointed out that she didn’t use the toll account so my friend immediately started checking her bank account online and discovered that there was a €500 pending payment for a hotel in South America. It took a few days to resolve but the bank re-credited her account.

My friend was in tears for allowing herself to be a victim of a scam and her confidence evaporated. She really didn’t need that on top of everything else she’d been dealing with.

@Collaborate what did that add to the debate?

Fair point. £92m is a drop in the ocean in comparison.

I think, @Raisinganiguana it was her way of telling you to be kinder and more compassionate. And I agree with her.