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An unprecedented wave of online bank fraud is hitting Britain

reuters.com

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Re: An unprecedented wave of online bank fraud is hitting Britain

#71

Post by foldr »

samhw wrote: post #9
rwmj wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Practically what happens if you're defrauded is your local police force will direct you to Action Fraud ( https://www.actionfraud.police.uk/ ) run by the City of London, who will note it down for "intelligence" but otherwise appear to do nothing whatsoever. Which is not too surprising - according to Wikipedia they have 80 staff. Edit: The reviews of Action Fraud speak for themselves: https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/…

Yeah, I'm somewhat familiar. I worked at a (fairly technological) UK bank, where we did investigations into scams like this. There's really not much that can be done about most of these scams, other than taking your multivitamins to prevent cognitive decline.

Is it really the case that not much can be done, or just that the resources aren't there to do it? Your average scammer isn't a criminal genius. You'd think a bit of good old fashioned police work would suffice in a lot of cases – if there were actually some police officers available to do that.

Re: An unprecedented wave of online bank fraud is hitting Britain

#72

Post by robotmay »

bluedino wrote: post #40
robotmay wrote: post #16

Ooh we're still the capital of something. Personally I think this comes down to ineffective education in many cases. Yes, some of these scams are getting quite impressively advanced, and they tend to target older people who are declining in cognitive ability, but so often the victims are absolutely unwilling to admit they were a bit stupid. It's always someone else's fault, like the bank, or the police, or Facebook,…

It's not a British thing, people get scammed in the US by the simplest and dumbest scams every day. The news is always warning people not to transfer money to the IRS etc if they call

I think the British and Americans have a lot in common which likely makes us equally susceptible, but perhaps some of the reasons are slightly different. To overly generalise two entire countries:

British: tend to defer to authority, tend to be overly polite.

Americans: tend to question authority, tend to have strong self-belief.

As a theoretical scammer I'd likely be looking at different approaches in the two countries, but with probably the same underlying scam. I imagine this is true for most countries, and I'd be curious to see how much of the approach has to change for different places.

Edit: I should add, I think the American fear of the IRS and the UK fear of HMRC are effectively equal. Everyone's scared of the tax man :D

Re: An unprecedented wave of online bank fraud is hitting Britain

#73

Post by mdp2021 »

Angostura wrote: post #50

I had a long argument with HSBC UK Security a few years ago where I was completely unable to get the to understand they were putting their customers at risk. In the event that something looked strange on your account the 'HSBC Fraud Department' would text you and ask them to call you on a phone number. A phone number that didn't appear anywhere on their website. "We don't want it public. OK,well at least put it on a…

In theory, you would first call your bank consultant to verify the number is legitimate. (Supposing the existence of a process which is not completely broken.)

Re: An unprecedented wave of online bank fraud is hitting Britain

#74

Post by avianlyric »

robotmay wrote: post #16

Ooh we're still the capital of something. Personally I think this comes down to ineffective education in many cases. Yes, some of these scams are getting quite impressively advanced, and they tend to target older people who are declining in cognitive ability, but so often the victims are absolutely unwilling to admit they were a bit stupid. It's always someone else's fault, like the bank, or the police, or Facebook,…

It's not just old people. Plenty of young tech savvy people fall for these scams as well.

The scammers are extremely well practiced, and are extremely good at using misdirection and pressure cooker situations to make it extremely difficult for people to recognise the scam in the moment. Some of the scariest aspects of these scams is that they frequently use the banks own fraud protections and alerts against victims, creating transactions they know will be declined, or inducing the bank to send legitimate login warnings, to create evidence that a victim needs to act soon to protect their money.

Scammers will also falsify phone numbers, calling from numbers that are either identical, or almost identical to the banks official number, and then ask the victim to compare the caller ID to number on the bank of bank card to build trust. Finally there's frequently a significant delay between the initial scam email/SMS and final scam. A victim will accidently enter their card details into fake package website, but nothing happens. Then three weeks later when they've forgotten about the fake website, the fraudsters will ring, using the data to "prove" they're from the bank, then ask the victim if they recently put their data into any dodgy websites (which of-course they did). Once they created the strong impression they're calling from the bank, reminded the victim of the earlier fake website, the victim is then perfectly primed to believe someone is trying to steal their money, and person on the phone is going to help prevent that.

TL;DR, these scams are extremely sophisticated, and perpetrated by intelligent individuals who's full time job is figuring out how to socially engineer people into handing over their cash. Don't assume your somehow "better" or more "immune" to these scams, or that victims aren't educated and intelligent. That grossly underestimates how capable these criminals are, and induces people to ignore the issues and victim blame instead.

Re: An unprecedented wave of online bank fraud is hitting Britain

#75

Post by ajsnigrutin »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #60
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bank phone numbers should be written on the back of credit/debit cards (and in a lot of countries, they are). "A fraudulent transaction has been detected on your credit card no. *1234, please call the number written on the back of your card", and you're done.

Unless the fraudulent transaction is due to the fact you just lost your credit card.

Well yeah.. but again, the number could also be in the footer of the banks website.

People usually get scammed when they have the card with them... when they lose the card, they're the one actively looking for a phone number, and not presented with one from a scammer.

Re: An unprecedented wave of online bank fraud is hitting Britain

#76

Post by rwmj »

bb101 wrote: post #63
rwmj wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banks make no money from retail customers as it is, they certainly aren't going to be reopening branches any time soon.

That's where effective legislation and regulation can play a role. It's not as if other parts of the same bank aren't making money hand over fist.

Is it better to spend money subsidising bank branches? Or generally improving security and beefing up the police? I would say the latter - it benefits everyone and reduces crime.

The actual actions of the government have been to do neither.

Re: An unprecedented wave of online bank fraud is hitting Britain

#77

Post by pfranz »

Nextgrid wrote: post #21
simonvc wrote: post #11

How is the world going to balance instant low friction commerce with the need to prevent instant low friction fraud... I don't think anyone has answers, it's a problem that will affect crypto payments as well as Fiat payments.. I hoped Confirmation of Payee would help, but the massive increase in APP fraud in the last 12 months seems to dispel that notion.. Maybe the answer is money that doesn't settle instantly.. Ki…

> Maybe all payments take 2 weeks to settle I'm not sure how that would help with regards to APP fraud. APP fraud is possible because scammers are successfully able to social-engineer people into sending their money away despite the various warnings (including on the payments UI in bank apps, or - in the US where this scam uses gift cards - to not tell the cashier or the bank what you're buying the gift cards for). I…

> I think the problem with APP fraud is a lack of user education (and maybe consequences - users expect the bank to always make them whole and so don't take security seriously) as well as insufficient enforcement on the other side

We know that banks don't want to discourage people from spending money or using their services, but even as a consumer I hate dealing with chargebacks.

My significant other doesn't watch their credit card statement and signed up for some LinkedIn service that was never used for like 6 months. LinkedIn isn't going to refund money that far back and chargebacks won't go back that far, either. I don't think any lesson was learned.

Maybe I'm more sympathetic to merchants and avoid charge backs? If I don't recognize a charge, I usually assume I don't recognize the merchant and investigate and reach out to them first. I feel like half the time I do have to issue charge backs the bank invalidates my card (even though I know it was not lost or stolen). I feel like they're penalizing me.

Re: An unprecedented wave of online bank fraud is hitting Britain

#78

Post by kasperni »

mysterypie wrote: post #68

What's always missing from stories like this is how the crooks get the money out. Considering that all Western governments have achieved total surveillance on our banking and made it impossible to have anonymous bank accounts, I'd like to see a detailed analysis about why they can't follow the money and see who gets it. Every scenario I can think of seems like it should be either traceable or actionable. Scenario 1:…

> What's always missing from stories like this is how the crooks get the money out.

It is in the article:

The fraudsters had told her to shift her "at risk" cash to an account on a cryptocurrency platform that they emptied - while isolating her from family by stressing secrecy and coaching her on how to respond to sceptical bank officials. "They knew the name of my financial adviser, they were utterly convincing as FCA staff," she said. "And they told me I could not tell anyone about the investigation as it would damage their efforts to catch the crooks."

Re: An unprecedented wave of online bank fraud is hitting Britain

#79

Post by SkipperCat »

numair wrote: post #13
simonvc wrote: post #11

How is the world going to balance instant low friction commerce with the need to prevent instant low friction fraud... I don't think anyone has answers, it's a problem that will affect crypto payments as well as Fiat payments.. I hoped Confirmation of Payee would help, but the massive increase in APP fraud in the last 12 months seems to dispel that notion.. Maybe the answer is money that doesn't settle instantly.. Ki…

> Maybe the answer is money that doesn't settle instantly.. Kind of like how your paypal payments are "on hold" whenever you get them to give the sender time to realise they've been scammed. Maybe all payments take 2 weeks to settle, and everyone lives on free credit up to the unsettled amount.. Well, all credit card payments are basically exactly this (which you’d know, given your previous job). The crypto crowd alw…

My father was scammed out of $1200 USD. He had a pop-up on his browser that said his computer was broken. It's the most cheesy scam on the web but this 80 year old man didn't know better. He thought he was getting a great deal - $1200 for lifetime support of his computer.

Anyway, he told us the same day and we immediately called his bank. It was under 24 hours and they shut down the payment. He didn't lose a penny.

So, yeah, I totally agree with you. The slowness of payments and chargebacks are a feature, not a bug. Same way that we have checkpoints before we deploy code to prod. Not having this assumes that everyone is making decisions in their best interest all the time. In reality, we do bone-headed things quite often and need a fair redo.

Re: An unprecedented wave of online bank fraud is hitting Britain

#80

Post by jvvw »

Angostura wrote: post #50

I had a long argument with HSBC UK Security a few years ago where I was completely unable to get the to understand they were putting their customers at risk. In the event that something looked strange on your account the 'HSBC Fraud Department' would text you and ask them to call you on a phone number. A phone number that didn't appear anywhere on their website. "We don't want it public. OK,well at least put it on a…

I have also had that with HSBC -if you call the main online banking number they will put you through but it involves being shunted around on hold. The thing I found most annoying was the attitude of the HSBC representatives when I said (very politely) that I wanted to call back.
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