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?

i agree op-she was sending money over time and said she knew him so why should the banks have to comepnsate her

it wasnt a fraud in the normal sense-if i decide to send someone i apprently know thats on me

As the banks are just about on the legal side of organised crime and facilitate money laundering and all sorts of activities that are negative to society, I don't have much sympathy for them. But of course it will be passed onto customers, but so are loads of other things like their huge fines for non compliance with regulatory requirements. Literally billions. At least this cost to us benefits vulnerable people.
But they should do everything to identify and freeze Bank accounts used by crime. It has to go somewhere electronically and they should know who controls any account. They make feck all effort to get the money back or take action against the scammwrs, which is the main issue.

Loss of capacity is not necessary for Finance POA if that is how it has been set up. You can specify that they can be activated under other circumstances if you wish.

Why did she get her money back? What was unique about her case? There are plenty of people who have been scammed, eg accidentally given away the whole of their pensions, to some scam artist. They don't get theirs back.

Its not £92m. That's only 1 part of the money refunded for push fraud. In the first 6 months if 2022 alone the total was over £140m and nearly half of all fraud attempts were blocked by banks.

It would be much better to stop the scammers in the first place.

Do you have a link to a source showing that that amount has been refunded? Or is that the amount that has been lost to scams? - because not all of those will be eligible for bank refunds

So the banks are advising people not to transfer money into a particular bank account because they think that that account belongs to scammers.
What's to stop them investigating that scam account? Why did they allow the scam account to be opened?
Presumably the banks are making enough profit from the money going in and out of the scammers accounts than it costs them to sometimes refund people.

We were scammed by roofers. My bank found in our favour and recovered half the money. They would not refund the rest as they felt we had not done 'due diligence'. I would hope that the same would be expected of everyone. We learnt a costly lesson.

Bank of Ireland announced in 2021 it is closing 103 branches out of around 320 with a wage bill saving of 114 million annually plus whatever it costs to run the branches, rent, electric, cleaning, etc
All those accounts are now online and will include a full spectrum of people, including vulnerable, who will not be seen by staff but are now a number in Dublin.
So they definitely have created a situation where there is more liklihood of a scam happening, so they should be compensating where it happens.
The CEO said they have seen a sharp decline in branch use over the last two years and a move to online and that was the reason. The survey period being 2020 and 2021.
Can't think of any reason people might have avoided their branch during that time🙄

In the last few months online scam store websites have become very sophisticated. My dh nearly bought some shoes from one yesterday then at the last minute checked the sizing chart and that was the giveaway. In all other respects when we put the real website against the fake they matched. The shoes were £5 cheaper on the scam site too.

Then the same can be said for gamblers who think the next one will be the big one. And the next, or the next. The casinos and lotteries encourage it every single day, with a quick warning about addiction.

They seem less bright and not very savvy, so perhaps they should also get paid back.

Then there are the people who buy into MLM schemes, people who will spend lots of money on "health cures" and people who will fall for investment "opportunities". All of them are basically less bright and less savvy than the normal person, because, just like the romance scammers, they fall for these things. So, I guess they need to be paid back too.

Do people in the UK get paid back for phone scams? What about the fly by night contractors? The door-to-door scammers?

Sometimes "victims" have to take some of the blame. I read a story recently in one of the money pages about a woman trying to get her money back after being scammed. She had been written to by the bank about the specific scam. She had been emailed. She had been texted. It was in the newspapers. She had ignored multiple warnings from the bank when making payments.

At a certain point, you have to be determined to be scammed. Short of the president of the bank knocking on her door to give her a good shake, what more can be done? And why, really, should she get her money back?

It's UK Finance fraud report for H1 2022

Exactly!! I find it hard to have sympathy for them.

There's a Facebook page for over 50 dating. It's absolutely shit, but I've not come off it because I just can't believe the people on there.

Glam, good looking pictures of young women pretending to want an older man. Hundreds of replies from old, ugly and probably very lonely men. It's complete madness. As if a young girl would want them.

And it's not as if their English is very good either.

It just amazes me.

It's not always someone's 'wee mum'

Some high-flying/highly qualified people get caught out too

People see what they want to see

Blaming the victims of crime serves no useful purpose.

It might encourage people not to fall for the same shit.

Giving everyone their money back no matter how stupid they've been...you might as well tell people to fling their money at every Nigerian prince on the internet. Sure why not, the bank will refund you anyway!

Exactly this. Plus banks also get into trouble for holding up people's funds if the person is deemed to be competent. It's a very tricky tightrope.

We just need to be better informed about these scams and to have improved support for people who are vulnerable and/or lonely so they are less likely to be scammed.

It tends to be pretty vulnerable people who are successfully manipulated by criminals.

A lot of the older people who fall for these 'romance scams' where a stunning 26 years old falls madly for a less than lovely 60+ years old, and I say that as a ltl 75 years old, are not victims of crime, they're victims of their own delusions. Why is it not possible for people to acknowledge their own short-comings, nothing's ever their fault?

"They pay for it out of profits"

Im afraid it's not that simple. It becomes cost of doing business and they take their costs and then they work out how to keep their profits aka return to shareholders the same by passing the costs along to those who use their service. That may be the charges you pay for or reduction in staffing levels or some other way to either increase revenue or reduce costs.
But either way I am sure that they don't reduce return to shareholders.

Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. But as someone else said, its vulnerable people who gamble and lose all their money too, and no-one thinks they should get it back every time do they?

Wow this thread is akin to a stoning- bet some of the posters on here would have revelled at the chance to watch a hanging back in the day!

I read about an interesting scam recently that is worth sharing. A young woman, 19 or so, loaned her friend £50 and he said he would transfer it to her the following week. When it came through it was far more, in the 100s, he said he'd made a mistake, draw it out, keep the £50 and give me the rest. A year later she was arrested for money laundering and was convicted, it took her over 10 years to get her credit sorted.

As far as the 'Dad I've lost my phone' scam is concerned, it would be worth having some coded phrase shared between family members so that unless it was included the recipient would know it was a scam.