[HN Gopher] An unprecedented wave of online bank fraud is hittin...
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An unprecedented wave of online bank fraud is hitting Britain
Author : rustoo
Score : 242 points
Date : 2021-10-14 09:57 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| rwmj wrote:
| _The NECC 's Reed said another problem was that just 1% of
| policing resources were dedicated to fighting fraud, despite it
| making up over a third of all crime in England and Wales._
|
| Is at least one major cause of the problem. The police and
| government's response has been pathetic. This is not a new thing
| either, it's been going on for years.
| samhw wrote:
| The other problem is that this statistic is nearly meaningless.
| If I run a bank scam, I might have 500k victims, but it won't
| take as many police to investigate as 500k rapes or murders or
| kidnappings would. This is comparing apples with oranges.
| rwmj wrote:
| 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/www.actionfraud.police.uk
| dazc wrote:
| Trustpilot - oh the irony!
| samhw wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > really not much that can be done about most of these
| scams
|
| I'm surprised that in the surveillance state it's that
| easy to disappear with the money.
| samhw wrote:
| It's not just one surveillance state ;)
|
| Most of these scammers are outside the UK, in India or
| Africa somewhere. Those countries do put a lot of
| resources into capturing 'Yahoo boys' and the like, but
| it's sometimes like looking for a needle in a haystack. I
| think the more realistic solution is to educate people so
| they don't fall for some of these preposterously blatant
| scams.
| _dain_ wrote:
| The term is "anarcho-tyranny".
| foldr wrote:
| 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.
| samhw wrote:
| We worked a fair bit with the police, and I never got the
| impression we were frustrated with their inaction. They
| devoted a lot of resources to it, but it's part of the
| nature of the beast that there just don't need to be as
| many officer hours per victim as there would be for a
| rape or murder.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| This isn't really a problem the police can solve: criminals are
| all abroad.
|
| This is a question of who is allowed non-in-person banking. And
| a few technology tweeks (getting rid of number spoofing). And
| education but that's a bit of a lost cause.
| jonatron wrote:
| Part of the problem is too many databases have been compromised.
| If a scammer calls up and knows all the victim's details, the
| scammer is much more convincing and the victim is much more
| likely to be fooled.
|
| As for why the UK is a hot spot, I could guess it's to do with
| the phone system? I get loads of spam calls, but I have no way to
| find out what company or person the caller phone numbers are used
| by.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I think the UK is a hot spot because its population speaks
| English, which means the same scammers that target the US can
| easily broaden their target market.
| robotmay wrote:
| Yeah spam calls are a nuisance in this country. Oddly I've
| gotten far fewer recently. My technique for answering unknown
| numbers seems to get me removed from a lot of lists:
|
| Pick up the phone, but stay silent. If it's an auto-dialler, it
| usually disconnects automatically after 4 seconds, and
| seemingly gets you removed from the list (as either a dead line
| or a machine I guess). Sometimes this catches legitimate call
| centres, but I probably didn't want to talk to them either.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| You do not use caller number review websites?
|
| In some cultures, most callers (private individuals) would
| not start speaking themselves before hearing a sign of
| presence from the other side: you filter out auto-diallers,
| but also contacts you did not have in your address book.
| dboreham wrote:
| In the US the criminals forge the ANI so it looks like a
| legit number, e.g a local business. We just never answer
| the phone. Real people can leave voice-mail.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I'm familiar with this custom. Unfortunately, I've
| adopted the habit of not leaving voicemail (if I'm
| determined, I talk gibberish until the callee picks up).
|
| And I haven't listened to recorded VMs for years. Way
| back when, I actually bought a machine for answering
| phone-calls. I have no idea what I was thinking :-)
| handrous wrote:
| Voicemail transcription is the only reason the "ignore it
| and if it matters they'll leave a voicemail" strategy
| works for me. I never, ever checked voicemails back when
| I had to actually listen to them. Now I can skim ten of
| them in a few seconds to see if any were legit. Most
| scammers/spammers don't leave a message anyway, so the
| volume's pretty low.
| tome wrote:
| They seem to use such varied numbers that phone number
| databases are no longer useful.
| herunan wrote:
| the amount of phishing texts I've been getting is crazy, and I'm
| very careful about sharing my number.
| Johnyma22 wrote:
| Britain being where the _victims_ are, not the criminals.
|
| Some reasons why Brits might be so so vulnerable:
|
| * Major: English speaking so common to be targeted from less
| affluent ex-commonwealth countries.
|
| * Major: Ageing population have most of the wealth.
|
| * Major: Lots of vulnerable victims online and relatively high
| social media engagement.
|
| * Major: Little fear of retaliation (other than Jim Browning).
| The UK is having less of an engagement in global policing (due to
| leaving Brexit) and has less reach as a consequence
|
| * Minor: Degrading international relations. Less empathy shown
| towards Brits due to somewhat inward looking foreign policies
| over the past decades.
|
| * Minor: Growing economic disparity causing a glut of "get rich
| quick" victims.
|
| Honestly I think Jim Browning is showing how this problem is
| solved and is probably having a 100x impact over the average bank
| worker. The Banks should be funding him and others like him.
|
| For those that don't know who Jim is, he does awesome work in
| identifying scammers and working with the local / relevant
| authorities into shutting their services down.
| jl6 wrote:
| > Britain being where the victims are, not the criminals.
|
| Britons could be the criminals too. It's easier to spearphish
| high value targets when using a familiar "trustworthy" accent
| and associated mannerisms and cultural knowledge.
| blfr wrote:
| Why would brexit impact police interactions with other
| commonwealth countries. Or even global policing.
| phreeza wrote:
| Commonwealth should be unaffected, but if the perpetrator is
| in the EU, i guess it could be because British police can no
| longer access the Shengen information system (SIS) database,
| or issue European Arrest Warrants (EAW).
| Chris2048 wrote:
| That's a big _if_ - why would a scammer risk the liability
| of operating in the EU if they can trivially outsource to
| somewhere untouchable?
| Retric wrote:
| Because criminals operate in every country and the EU has
| a large and often English speaking population. It's the
| same with the US/UK where plenty of scammers operate in
| each country while targeting the other. Email doesn't
| care about national borders, it does care about language.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > because criminals operate in every country
|
| Sure, they do, but what does that matter; or what does
| "operate" mean in this sense? You can outsource to
| elsewhere i.e. you _can_ operate anywhere.
|
| > the EU has a large and often English speaking
| population
|
| So do many places, the EU is by no means unique in this
| respect. But there's a reason "cost centres" are being
| outsourced to India or the Philippines, more often than
| than the EU. And in the context of criminal operations,
| "language-speakers" is by far the least
| important/riskiest factor relative to those that would
| get you arreseted.
|
| > It's the same with the US/UK
|
| Is it? Do you have (statistical) examples?
|
| > Email doesn't care about national borders
|
| Wrt liability, (i.e. Arrest Warrants, the context of this
| thread) email, or at least the senders of, _do_ care;
| more-so than language. Unless you are implying criminals
| care more about maximising profit than getting caught?
| PeterisP wrote:
| AFAIK Europol has been a significant factor in fighting
| online fraud because much of it is international and the same
| group targets many EU countries at once.
| simonh wrote:
| Because we lost access to many EU police databases and data
| sharing agreements. We negotiated continued access to some
| stuff, but there are still some significant gaps.
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-56529359
| Chris2048 wrote:
| How are these databases used to police/punish the
| stereotypical Nigerian scammer?
| simonh wrote:
| I don't think that's a reasonable question, not all
| scammers are Nigerian. Some are based in the UK, others
| in Europe. Also the EU had data sharing agreements and
| collaboration outreach with police forces all over the
| world that we also lost access to.
|
| That's one of the complications with our data sharing
| with the EU; they have agreements to share data with non-
| EU countries on the basis that their data is only shared
| within the EU, which we are now not. Therefore the EU
| can't grant us access to databases containing that data
| until we/they have permission from these other countries.
| We will, and are sorting it out but it's going to take
| time. Brexit was always going to come with some costs,
| that should be obvious even if you think on balance it
| was the right choice, and this is one of them.
| tremon wrote:
| The intended interpretation is (Nigerian scam)mer, not
| (Nigerian) scammer; the scammers aren't Nigerian, the
| scam is. It refers to one of the earliest well-known
| forms of a type of e-mail scam: "Hello, I'm a Nigerian
| prince with a lots of funds but I can't access it, please
| send me $amount so I can get access and I will return it
| ten-fold".
| mdp2021 wrote:
| The poster forgot the bunny quotes ("so-to-say") in
| <<stereotypical "Nigerian scammer">>, but added the term
| 'stereotypical' to lead you there, and the content was
| clear: certainly the poster did not express or suggest
| that <<scammers are Nigerian>>. "Scotch tape" is from
| Minnesota, and the Scots are probably not that disturbed
| from the underlying idea of "Careful with that glue,
| Eugene! "Be a Scot", don't waste it". The Nigerian
| princes happened, terminology spawned, Nigeria has
| presumably not yet demanded that those scams should be
| called with Greek letters. Because we are not fools and
| we know losing one's head is not decapitation, and losing
| one's mind is not misplacing it on the wrong table. You
| know what's Eugene even if no-one's called Eugene, and if
| you don't you can get it's a cultural reference.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > not all scammers are Nigerian
|
| Of course not; but "stereotypical" ones are definitely
| Nigerian.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > I don't think that's a reasonable question, not all
| scammers are Nigerian.
|
| Than a non-sequitur, why would it matter? superbugs that
| originate in hospitals can escape and cause harm beyond a
| hospice; and if certain locales, Nigeria being the
| _famous_ example of, are harder to touch, then those
| places will be selected-for for by scammers.
|
| Consider that certain places are harder to police than
| others (which is basically the whole premise of this
| thread in the first place - than the EU is better policed
| than the UK); or that criminal operations could operate
| somewhere other then their place-of-origin.
|
| > Some are based in the UK, others in Europe.
|
| And if the European ones are more likely to get caught,
| there will be fewer of them, and a lot of those that
| remain won't operate locally.
|
| > Also the EU had data sharing agreements and
| collaboration outreach
|
| I don't doubt data-sharing is more difficult, I question
| if it makes any (long term) difference to remote (i.e.
| over the phone, or email) scams.
|
| The question is how does that data relate to catching
| scammers who trivially outsource from elsewhere? Does the
| EU have _any_ data on which EU companies run scams out of
| Nigeria[*0]? Even if the EU has a data-sharing agreement
| with Nigeria, I doubt the government even keeps tabs on
| the scammers. Plus, you can always move to wherever there
| _isn 't_ such a data-sharing agreement e.g. somewhere
| semi-hostile/antagonistic to Europe.
|
| [0] SIDENOTE: I _would_ mention somewhere _other_ than
| Nigeria, so not as to seem to "pick on" the place,
| except - 1) Nigeria _is_ established as famous for scams
| already, b) that would only make me _more_ susceptible to
| downvotes from people triggered by me mentioning their
| somewhere-they-hold-dear in a negative light.
| oefrha wrote:
| From TFA:
|
| > While security experts and senior bankers said many fraud
| attacks could be traced overseas - including from India and
| West Africa - Britain is also increasingly exporting attacks.
|
| > ...
|
| > "It's popular to say the fraud threat is imported into the
| UK, and I don't think that bears analysis," said NECC's Reed.
| "There is a significant UK nexus to a lot of fraud, our
| operational experience is showing that."
| avianlyric wrote:
| From personal experience working on this problem I would
| strongly agree with idea that a lot of bank fraud is home
| grown.
|
| The police in the UK have a very poor track record of
| actually dealing with bank fraud. The nature of the crime,
| and way UK policing works, means there's a significant number
| of disincentives to actually investigating bank fraud. Two of
| the biggest showstoppers is location/jurisdiction and
| training, which police force should investigate? The one
| where the victim lives, or the one where the criminal lives?
| Police training focuses almost entirely on crimes with a
| physical element, if someone robbed your store, then the
| police know how to help. If they rob your bank account, they
| haven't foggiest on where to start that kind of
| investigation.
|
| Additionally each individual case of fraud tends to be for
| small amounts (thousands to tens of thousands), so are
| frequently ignored. It's only in aggregate that the sums
| become meaningful to police, but they rarely consider fraud
| on anything other than a case-by-case basis. The result, as a
| bank we can tell the police exactly who commited a crime,
| where they live, what they look like, where they eat
| breakfast, what their social media handles are etc, and
| nothing will happen. The report and all the data vanishes
| into the blackhole known as the NCA.
| aix1 wrote:
| This reminds me of how I used to get fake passports.
|
| There was a period when almost every day I had Royal Mail
| drop through my letterbox envelopes containing various fake
| documents (passports, driving licences, National Insurance
| letters, ID cards from various EU counties). Someone was
| mailing those from a nearby post office and putting my
| address on the back of the envelopes as the sender. A
| fraction could not be delivered and got returned to the
| "sender", some having travelled to, and returned from,
| other countries.
|
| I reported this several times, both to Action Fraud and to
| the police. At some point I spent an entire Friday evening
| sitting at a local police station, thinking that, if I
| brought the documents to them in person, the police would
| be less inclined to think I was some crackpot making the
| whole thing up. I also thought that the fact the documents
| were being mailed from a post office across the road from
| the police station might pique their interest (the letters
| had tracking numbers and so I could look up their journeys
| on the Royal Mail web site).
|
| In the end this turned out to be a waste of time. The
| front-office police person were clearly pretty unhappy with
| having to deal with this, but escalated to someone who
| "knew more about these things". The latter applied the
| investigative method of typing "Portuguese driving licence"
| into Google Image Search and comparing the results with one
| of the licences I gave them. After a further escalation to
| an even more specialised officer, the conclusion was that
| the documents were indeed fake.
|
| I got a crime reference number and a clear indication that
| I would never hear from them again, which I indeed haven't.
|
| Still have all the docs (the police didn't want to keep
| them). They stopped coming after a while.
| 123pie123 wrote:
| another factor is cost - the police do not have enough
| resourses to investigate
|
| a few weeks ago my car was hit and the driver just drove
| off without stopping to give details (hit and run) the
| incident was caught on my dashcam inc car reg plate and
| faces.
|
| After informing the police on 101 - they said sorry they do
| not investigate hit and run anymore unless a serious injury
| has occured - no resources available
| franga2000 wrote:
| Yeah, Jim Browning definitely needs to go teach law enforcement
| how to do their job, preferably in exchange for the biggest
| consulting cheque the world has ever seen.
|
| Ths problem, as always, is that they don't actually want to do
| that. They'd rather stay incompetent because it lets them let
| criminals off more easily. We have the same problem where I
| live but with illegal work for often far below minimum wage.
| The cops and tax inspectors keep saying they're understaffed,
| underfunded and undertrained to do anything about the problem,
| yet two journalism students have been able to catch and report
| more cases of illegal working conditions than the inspectors do
| in one year.
|
| I used to wonder why, until I saw one of the main white collar
| cops in the city having a beer with the dude that I know for a
| fact regularly pays people minimum wage then has them give him
| half of it back in cash or they're fired. I asked around and it
| turns out they're childhood friends so he lets him do whatever.
| And we're not even close to the higher half of the corruption
| index! I can't imagine how things work in a country that's
| worse off...
| jl6 wrote:
| Did you report the wage theft crime that you suspected?
| franga2000 wrote:
| I didn't have any proof, only the word of a few people that
| were still working for him and couldn't afford to lose
| their jobs.
|
| I do however know that he was reported and investigated at
| least once by a former employee, but the investigation
| unsurprisingly found no proof ("agreements" were all verbal
| and everything was done in cash). The cops said that with
| just one testimony a conviction was unlikely and nothing
| really came of it.
|
| In general, these things rarely get resolved because the
| worker can't risk snitching because they'd lose their only
| source of income and once they leave and get a better job,
| they're just happy it's behind them and don't pursue it
| further.
| _hilro wrote:
| What an absolutely infantile comment.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Explain yourself. What is infantile in what you read.
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| "The solution's easy, I could solve it immediately if
| only people would listen to me" - Person With Absolutely
| Zero Experience In The Field.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| What I get out of that post is "The solution is they have
| to want to fix the problem."
|
| Which is _simple_ but is very different from calling it
| _easy_.
| accnumnplus1 wrote:
| Nothing so complicated. With open borders the UK was a popular
| destination - and the training ground, and work environment.
| Now lockdowns have forced people to double down. Some below
| mentioned the infamous Nigerians, it's usually the Albanian
| region.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| It's also because the britanic banking system decided that, on
| the safety / usability balance, they would choose usability.
|
| Banking in britanic banking system is way easier than anywhere
| else. I remember when I was a student, they sent a bus to the
| university, so we could just hop in, arrive at the bank, and
| open an account as an immigrant in 15 minutes.
|
| Try to do that in France, you would get your card, what, next
| month at best?
|
| It was only a matter of time before the criminals realize the
| door was unlocked and feast on them.
|
| In fact, I'm expecting Australia to be next, for the very same
| reasons.
|
| Have you tried to do any paper work in Australia ? It's. So.
| Simple. Seriously, for a french, it's a video game on easy
| mode, and you never leave the tutorial.
|
| But there is trust everywhere.
|
| They are either going down, or make the system harder to work
| with.
| calvinv wrote:
| Just an fyi, for at least the last 6 years it is very
| difficult for any kind of migrant to open an account
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Also worth noting:
|
| * UK infrastructure makes number spoofing very easy.
|
| * UK banking legislation (and court rulings) put banks in a
| difficult position: they MUST accept a clients instruction to
| transfer money and do so rapidly (unless doing so would be a
| crime).
| pjc50 wrote:
| I would be interested in knowing which court rulings those
| are.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Some of the more recent judgements are outlined here:
|
| https://www.mondaq.com/uk/financial-services/1056304/uk-
| high...
|
| But it goes all the way back to common law. Basically the
| bank is a customers agent and must obey instructions to the
| best of its ability. It must exercise reasonable skill etc
| obeying those instructions. But unless it suspects fraud it
| cannot disobey. To quote: a bank is not required to act as
| an amateur detective.
|
| There is very little room for them to decline a customer
| instruction once given. It needs to be pretty blatant fraud
| or otherwise illegal. Sending money to another account is
| neither on the face of it.
| avianlyric wrote:
| > they MUST accept a clients instruction to transfer money
| and do so rapidly (unless doing so would be a crime).
|
| Not quite true. Banks are required to accept and process
| instructions quickly, the general idea being that bank should
| never prevent an individual from accessing their own money.
| But protecting a client from fraud is a legitimate reason for
| slowing down a transaction, you just can't delay it
| indefinitely. There are plenty of UK banks that will delay
| outbound bank payments by up to 24 hours if they think
| there's a good chance someone is being defrauded.
| Angostura wrote:
| 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 non-linked page so that if you
| SEARCH for the number on the website search tool, it returns a
| page with the number on "Well, I suppose that's an idea I could
| pass on".
|
| Even when I said to them "You are training your customers to
| accept potentially fraudulent text messages" they didn't get it.
|
| Infuriating.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| 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.)
| jvvw wrote:
| 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.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _The thing I found most annoying was the attitude of the HSBC
| representatives when I said (very politely) that I wanted to
| call back_
|
| Because they poor person on the phone gets dinged for not
| completing the transaction. You doing the right thing causes
| them to look bad in the computer-tallied automated
| productivity tracking tool.
|
| Call center employee metrics are absolutely brutal.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| 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.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Unless the fraudulent transaction is due to the fact you just
| lost your credit card.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| 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.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| - "Sir, I'm calling you because I found your card, I
| called your bank, and they gave me your number. They told
| me you should report the card as lost in case it's been
| used fraudulently with the phone number that is written
| at the back of the card"
|
| - "Can you send me back the card?"
|
| - "I'm in a train, I won't be able to do that for a
| while. You should really call"
|
| - "But I don't have the number"
|
| - "I can read it to you"
|
| Pwn
| mnw21cam wrote:
| Red flag number 1 - my bank wouldn't give someone random
| my telephone number. That would be illegal.
| lazide wrote:
| Good thing there are no data leaks or compromises! /s
|
| That my bank insists on using essentially now public
| information now to verify (and refuses to use anything
| else, even after being repeatedly asked!) is also
| infuriating. Last 4 of SSN and DOB? Really?
| mnw21cam wrote:
| Well, the point isn't that my bank wouldn't "leak" my
| details - I certainly don't trust them that far. So it's
| absolutely possible for a random person to get my phone
| number from the bank. But if a random person were to
| phone me and tell me that my bank gave them my phone
| number to be helpful, I'd be calling that out as a lie.
| lazide wrote:
| If someone spoofs the banks number on caller ID
| (trivial), knows all your security question answers, the
| bank you bank with, and your number - very few people are
| NOT going to fall for some kind of attack there correct?
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| How could they figure out the internal account number
| without hacking into the bank in the first place? I'm
| fairly certain there's no way to derive the account
| number from a debit card number or any of the info you
| mentioned.
| lazide wrote:
| Via the data leak issue I mentioned?
| [https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/capital-one-warns-more-
| data...] which are becoming more and more common?
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| You have confirmation that internal account numbers were
| leaked in the capital one breach?
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| But for this, you must lose a card, not realize you lost
| it, a scammer must find your card, and he must somehow
| get your phone number to scam you.
| burnished wrote:
| The important part is that you are able to look
| up/personally verify that you are contacting the correct
| people. If I lose my card I can still look up the right
| number on my banks website. Because you cannot confidently
| identify a caller it is better for the customer to reach
| out using more easily verified information.
| kube-system wrote:
| If my bank has blocked fraudulent transactions for a card
| I've lost, I'm not in much hurry to respond. They've
| already blocked it, and I don't have the card to use
| anyway.
| Vrondi wrote:
| That number should also be on every single billing
| statement you've ever received from them, so you know,
| check that paper or pdf.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| If I was talking to employees of the "Mexican drug cartel money
| laundering corporation", I too would be disappointed they don't
| give a shit.
| mhandley wrote:
| Natwest seems to have taken to sending me text messages listing
| three recent transactions (where one is suspicious to them),
| and asking did you make these? Reply y or n.
|
| I can't verify that the text is from Natwest, but it seems
| relatively safe, as I'm not providing any personal information
| in return, so this seems a reasonable first line security
| mechanism. Of course someone could clone my SIM, in which case
| there's no protection, but it does raise the bar for using a
| stolen cards, and I think that's the intent.
|
| If my bank ever does call me, they have to leave voicemail
| because I don't answer calls from unknown numbers. And then I
| call back using the number on the back of the card.
| valdiorn wrote:
| I had a similar experience from HSBC. They called me about a
| potential fraudulent claim. They asked for my DOB, card number,
| sort code, you know, to verify "that I am who I say"... all the
| stuff they SHOULDN'T ask, and stupidly I gave it all up.
|
| To be fair, I did because my card had been rejected literally
| 30 seconds before while trying to make a purchase. But it was
| only after the phone call ended that I realised what I had
| done. I phoned them back on a number listed on their website,
| asked them to confirm that I had indeed spoken with HSBC fraud
| detection, and they confirmed. I then lambasted them for asking
| me all the questions they tell their customers never to answer.
|
| They're just training their customers to give out information,
| and even alert customers like myself can sometimes have a
| moment of panic and comply.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| In fairness HSBC calls from known numbers (granted, you may
| not recognise it the first time, but you can look it up then
| save it) and publishes numbers where you can call them [1]
|
| [1] https://www.hsbc.co.uk/help/security-centre/report-a-
| problem...
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| If I don't care that you can redial the displayed number
| and get me this doesn't matter when I spoof my outgoing
| number though...
| kabdib wrote:
| This doesn't help when it's so common to spoof caller-id.
| The telco industry has blown any trust we can put in this
| information.
|
| [I just learned that the FCC is _considering_ not allowing
| calls made outside the US to be spoofed as numbers
| originating inside the US. I thought that was the _whole
| point_ behind STIR /SHAKEN, silly me].
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| It does help because you can call back if you recognise
| the number (which defeats spoofed caller ID) or call the
| number published.
|
| There's not really any alternative to calling a trusted
| number.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I hope your admonitions to the call center drone who picked
| up your call were emotionally satisfying to you, because
| that's as far as they went. If you want to influence company
| policy on something like that your best bet is a highly
| visible social media conversation. The poor call center drone
| who was the subject of your wrath literally just sighed and
| stared at the wall for a second after your call then opened
| up the line to the next person who was going to yell at them.
| pfranz wrote:
| US credit card companies aren't any better. I recently had a
| similar "fraud alert." The company ditched travel notices in
| 2016 claiming their AI was good enough to replace it. A few
| weeks after traveling I had a very small purchase flagged
| (under $20 at a place like Target). When I called the number
| they asked me for my complete credit card number, social
| security number, they didn't know my phone number or email and
| had to clarify which was my first and last name. They then
| asked me to photograph my drivers license and text it to them.
|
| When I told them I wasn't comfortable doing this, they
| reiterated that this was the only way my credit card would be
| restored immediately and once I hung up the phone I would no
| longer have this option. They did give me another way to
| verify, they would send me an email to a web portal I could
| upload the photos to. After uploading I would have to wait 7-10
| business days for them to review and restore my card.
|
| Thankfully, I had another credit card I could use. I did submit
| via the web form after doing my best to make sure it was legit.
| Weeks later my credit card wasn't restored. When I later called
| them, it was immediately restored after a few simple questions.
| I sent an email to their security department describing how
| weird and sketchy this process was and I never got a response.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Incidently for those with a VPN installed on their phone do
| not use your banking app while the VPN is running.
|
| The current "We don't need you to tell us where you're going
| we can figure it out" leads to me getting locked out 100% of
| the time i use the banking app on my phone with the VPN on
| and then try to use the card at a nearby store. Obviously
| there's two different sources of my location incoming and
| that causes issues.
|
| I guess it's an edge case to have a VPN on your phone but
| it's very very frustrating.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Lucky for me it just crashes/hangs on login if my VPN is on
| so I don't have to worry about the app reporting me (Ally
| Bank, app otherwise relatively good)
| reaperducer wrote:
| Depends on your bank.
|
| One large bank I do business with doesn't care, or
| recognizes that pre-'rona I used to do a lot of
| international travel.
|
| Another large bank I do business with locks me out if I'm
| on VPN.
|
| I also suspect it has to do with bank balances. The more
| money I have in my accounts, the better customer service I
| get, even to the point of them answering the phone more
| quickly.
|
| It also seems to help to have a business account with a
| bank, too. I get all kinds of free perks on my personal
| accounts with the bank I do my business banking with.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Thankfully, I had another credit card I could use.
|
| You pretty much have to these days, preferably with the
| second one being from a different bank and potentially
| different payment processor. Between random fraud triggers
| and cards being frozen because of fraudulent charges or
| attempts, you really need a backup.
|
| I've never had trouble dealing with the problem by phone but
| I'm still out the credit card in a foreign city for a few
| days and I may not even be at a location where I can easily
| have something sent to me.
| easton wrote:
| Not all US credit card companies are like this. I
| specifically remember a few years ago that my Mom got a call
| from AMEX about some fraud on her card, to which she
| responded "I never get calls from you, how do I know this is
| real?". They said no problem, just hang up and call the
| number on the back of your card.
|
| I believe some banks even skip the call entirely, and just
| prompt you to call the number on the card.
| djhworld wrote:
| On traditional landline phones that older folk tend to use
| (although I guess that's dwindling every year) a common
| tactic for scammers is to ask the victim to call the number
| on the back of the card.
|
| However the scammers don't hang up they just play a fake
| dial tone so the victim dials the number thinking they're
| contacting their bank but they're actually just speaking to
| the scammers again
| martijnvds wrote:
| How did that work?
|
| In the Netherlands, in the 80s-00s at least, hanging up
| cleared your line, so picking it up again would get you a
| fresh dialtone even if the other side didn't hang up (and
| the other side would get a modified "busy" signal if you
| hung up on them).
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| this was (is?) a "feature" that let you answer a call in
| say the front hall, then hang-up and continue the call in
| your office as long as the originating caller did not
| hang up the handset. The scam relies on actually playing
| a dial-tone and ringing after the victim "hangs up",
| which is how some people noticed it "sounded weird" and
| then called their bank on another line or cell phone.
| 317070 wrote:
| Because when you hear the other side (pretend to) hang
| up, you need to not be fooled and also hang up on your
| side. If you don't hang up on your side, then on older
| phones you actually have no way of telling the call is
| still going.
|
| On your smartphone, it's easier to not fall in this trap,
| as the screen is making it harder to type a phone number
| while the call is still going.
| tsukikage wrote:
| No, this isn't just confusion, this is a real behaviour
| difference between smartphones and (some) landlines. If
| someone calls you on a landline, depending on the
| exchange, hanging up your phone might not be enough to
| end the call; when you pick up again, you may still be
| connected to the caller.
|
| It used to be the case that the party who made the call -
| being the party who is paying for it - was solely
| responsible for terminating it; then timeouts were
| introduced; and on many landline exchanges there is still
| a timeout before the call is actually terminated if the
| callee hangs up but the caller does not - although these
| days it is just a few seconds, that may still be long
| enough that you stay connected to the original caller if
| you hang up then immediately try to place a call.
|
| Google "called party clear" for gory details.
| [deleted]
| toast0 wrote:
| Different telephone switches (the big ones in the central
| offices) have different behavior for clearing the line
| when one party hangs up. I've heard that some switches
| wouldn't clear the line for tens of seconds when a called
| party hung up, and that those switches were common in the
| UK.
|
| I personally recall people ocassionally being able to
| hang up one phone before picking up a different phone if
| they wanted to take the call in a diffent location in the
| house. Although, I don't remember it ever being very
| effective, over time (in my corner of the US), it became
| never effective, so you'd just leave the first phone off
| the hook and have to hang it up later.
| [deleted]
| plainnoodles wrote:
| Agreed. I personally carry a Citi card (double cash)
| because it has the best (for me) rewards, but I also carry
| an AMEX blue cash preferred for which I pay an annual fee.
| The customer service I get from amex is DRAMATICALLY better
| than from Citi.
|
| With Citi: * it's non-native-English support. No judgement
| of course but I don't appreciate the language barrier when
| the entire job of customer support is communication. *
| Support generally seems to be very low-context and low-
| power. The person you talk to generally can't actually do
| anything, only escalate. * Support seems very disjointed
| and prone to missing details.
|
| I was burned by Citi support in a pretty big way:
|
| 1. I was moving cross-state, and we were selling (under
| contract) our old house and not yet closed on the new one.
| In between, we were living with my parents.
|
| 2. Literally the first day we were at my parents, some
| fraudy charges showed up on my citi card. I called, they
| cancelled the card, etc. I told them I was not currently at
| my address on file, I was at my parents, is this OK, etc.
| They said yes, that's fine, they'll send replacement cards
| to the new address. I very specifically verified with them
| that they were sending them to the right place, and the
| person even got a little tired of me being so tight about
| it. Ok, I figured, I feel like I've gone above and beyond
| on my end to make sure this works right.
|
| 3. 2 days later, I see on my security camera that the old
| cards have been delivered to the front door of the old
| house, 300 miles away.
|
| 4. I call back, and they tell me they don't see any record
| of me having requested a different address. Sigh. I ask if
| they can cancel _those_ cards and re-send them to the right
| address this time. They say yes, we go through the loop
| again, etc.
|
| 5. I wait a day or two and no cards show up at either
| location. I call back again. I get told there's no record I
| asked to cancel these cards or re-send them. This rep
| finally tells me they can't re-issue the cards again so
| soon, and need to wait 5 more days. In the meantime, these
| active cards are just sitting on my porch in a big envelope
| that says "CITI - URGENT - PLEASE STEAL ME" written all
| over it.
|
| And, you know, I really needed to use this card since I was
| trying to buy appliances for the new house.
|
| I ended up resolving this by just making an extra trip back
| to the old house anyway just to finish cleaning it up and
| to grab the cards since I needed to go one more time
| anyway. I called back to make sure they weren't going to
| cancel these cards, and of course there was no record I'd
| ever asked to cancel them, etc.
|
| Compare this to AMEX support. Native english speakers, they
| seem to have the power to actually just fix things for me,
| etc.
|
| So, while I still use my citi card just to keep the credit
| line open, my Amex card is my pinch hitter and cornerstone.
| kube-system wrote:
| > In the meantime, these active cards are just sitting on
| my porch in a big envelope that says "CITI - URGENT -
| PLEASE STEAL ME" written all over it.
|
| I have more than a few credit cards, and I've never
| encountered a card issuer in the US that mails active
| cards. All of them require some sort of activation
| process before they can be used. That way, it doesn't
| matter if they're stolen.
| thrashh wrote:
| My US cards send me texts and I reply Y.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| Same here for my UK cards. Good system.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| A weird one that happened to me a few years ago was when I
| ordered about $100 worth of products from banggood, my
| phone rang within seconds of the purchase going through.
| The display on my phone showed it to be a bank I never
| heard of. When I did a search, it turned out to be a small
| bank with about a dozen branches in a state hundreds of
| miles away. The voicemail however was from my bank's fraud
| department informing me they were locking my card due to
| unusual activity. When I called my bank using the number on
| my card, they verified that the original call was from them
| and they were able to unlock my card. They had no idea why
| the name of a different bank showed up on my phone. Best I
| can determine is that my cell provider was the one who
| added the name information and something in their database
| was incorrect.
| bluGill wrote:
| Most banks don't do their own everything. A few seemingly
| little banks (often in the middle of nowhere) take on
| different tasks. It could well be that when you called
| "your bank" the other bank was originating the call and
| the person at your bank didn't know how the backend was
| really wired.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| I've definitely noticed that some small regional banks
| make extra money by offering services to other small
| banks and credit unions. For example, cashier's checks
| issued by my (fairly large actually) credit union are
| actually drawn on a midwestern regional bank that they
| seem to use as a service provider. So it's possible that
| bank is somehow involved in your bank's card issuance.
|
| I also wonder if it's a contract call center or fraud
| prevention company and the caller ID value was just
| bad... at some point their phone number may have gotten
| put on a listing for one of the banks that uses them and
| now it's stuck in the Google Caller ID database or
| whatever. Google's caller ID is frequently pretty out of
| date and it's unclear how you would get it fixed (e.g. my
| husband has had his phone number for years and Android
| phones still show someone else's name when he calls).
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| THat's my experience; they specifically ask you to call the
| number on the back of your physical card.
| whitepoplar wrote:
| Chase?
| latchkey wrote:
| Amex?
| kingcharles wrote:
| American Express
| tristor wrote:
| I guarantee that experience wasn't with American Express.
| My experience has been that Chase has invested heavily in
| automated fraud management /and/ that it works reasonably
| well, but they have no real paths outside their strict
| processes for going around it. American Express is much
| more personable, at least for high value accounts, and
| still allows you to insert travel advisories which have
| date ranges.
| latchkey wrote:
| My experience as a new Amex customer has been horrid
| along these same lines. Everyone talks up Amex, but I'm
| not seeing it so far.
| reaperducer wrote:
| I had my Amex card cancelled for "non-payment," even
| though I paid.
|
| Then a month later, Amex mailed me a check for the money
| I paid because it had no account to credit it to, because
| it cancelled the account.
| anpago wrote:
| Hopefully this trial 159 scheme takes off one simple number to
| call regardless of bank.
|
| https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2021/09/stop--hang-up...
|
| I mentioned to a fewer older family members and they were all
| for a simple number to call.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| Reminds me of the "now there are 14 standards" xkcd.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| And don't get me started on banks sending out emails chock full
| of "Click this link!" It's like they're setting people up to
| get phished.
| distances wrote:
| I have three bank accounts and none of them send emails with
| links. If they send any email to start with, they just say go
| read your messaging/documents on your bank account.
| kevincox wrote:
| For most banks it is fine. They say "Click this link" I click
| it, then click "Login" and everything is fine.
|
| Other banks purposely break my password manager so I have a
| high chance of pasting my password into a phishing site
| because I am in a habit of pasting my password for that bank.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| >Even when I said to them "You are training your customers to
| accept potentially fraudulent text messages" they didn't get
| it.
|
| You were talking to a call centre worker making close to
| minimum wage and who's job is to get shouted at by customers
| all day. Even if they wanted to help you, their opinion would
| count for nothing.
|
| No wonder they didn't give a shit.
| ksdale wrote:
| In the US, we had a medical provider who, when they would call
| _you_ to give you test results, would attempt to get you to
| verify your identity by telling them part of you social
| security number. Haha, you called me! How do I know _you 're_
| who you say you are?
| lol768 wrote:
| All the major banks offer Confirmation of Payee nowadays. Why are
| people still falling victim to APP?
| LatteLazy wrote:
| They also repeated say in bold "don't send money to people you
| don't know" and "We will NEVER ask you to transfer cash" and
| "Once sent money cannot be retrieved" etc.
|
| A lot of very dumb people have 5 or 6 figure cash piles.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I had an APP scam attempt where I intentionally played their
| game (by providing fake details) to see how it would go. They
| were claiming I owed taxes and a legal case was underway that I
| could resolve by paying said taxes but I'd need to pay the
| money to the court-appointed lawyer/public defender (whose name
| & account details they provided me) and not HMRC.
| robotmay wrote:
| I imagine this is weirdly easy to socially engineer your way
| around, as a scammer. "Oh you can ignore that, we're a
| subsidiary department of the bank so it shows up differently"
| etc
| IshKebab wrote:
| Ultimately you can't really stop people from falling for con men,
| but I do feel part of the blame lies with banks and other
| institutions for normalising out-of-the-blue phone calls.
|
| How would you know a call from the bank about fraudulent
| transactions was fake? _They do that!_ I 've even had legitimate
| calls from them where they refuse to pass _my_ security questions
| because of data protection. Pure madness.
| robotmay wrote:
| Yeah NatWest are majorly guilty of this. They used to phone me
| with a script that was like:
|
| NW: "Hello, am I speaking to <robotmay>?"
|
| Me: "Who's asking?"
|
| NW: "I'm calling from the NatWest fraud team, we'd like to
| verify your transactions. First we need to ask some security
| questions: what is your account number?"
|
| Me: :|
|
| Online-only banks like Monzo/Starling are better at this aspect
| - they never seem to phone anyone, which at this point I'd
| consider a security feature.
| loriverkutya wrote:
| I had the same experience with them and when I told them that
| I'm not going to give them any information over the phone
| because I have no way to verify anything I was told is true
| so give me a phone number I can contact them to verify the
| transaction then I was told that I'm overly cautious and
| stupid phrased in a nice and British way. And the transaction
| they flagged was a PS30 payment in a city restaurant. I'm no
| longer with them.
| kennydude wrote:
| Monzo has some app integration with their phone staff too.
| They can send push notifications to open the app to a certain
| point etc,
| rlpb wrote:
| I think this is a regulatory failure. Banks should be stopped,
| by regulation, from doing things that harm public expectations
| in this way.
| jmugan wrote:
| I just got a fraudulent email from someone impersonating my bank
| about small changes to the terms of service, but all of the links
| appear legitimate. No phone numbers either. I guess this is some
| sort of long-con to get me to trust the email address? It ended
| in the legitimate domain name of the bank.
| mFixman wrote:
| I moved to Britain a couple of years ago, and I was surprised at
| how many legitimate transactions are done in an insecure way.
|
| For example, I had had to talk my credit card number out loud on
| a telephone call to put a deposit on a flat and to renew some
| subscriptions.
|
| At the same time, most high street banks have terrible security
| infrastructure: HSBC regularly calls me and asks me to give
| sensitive information and sends me PIN codes via snail mail and
| text message.
|
| These things tend to work in a first-world high-trust society
| like the UK, but I'm not surprised that people fall for these
| scams. I'm lucky that most of them seem to target older and more
| gullible people than I; otherwise they could be impossible to
| separate from legitimate actions.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| The US isn't much better. It's still common to hand your credit
| card to the waiter in a restaurant where they walk off to some
| terminal in the back with it and do whatever they want.
| simonvc wrote:
| 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.. 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..
|
| edit: I worked at Monzo for 5 years, and was in the original
| Confirmation of Payee meetings as Monzos rep to Open Banking
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > 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 would expect the same social-engineering to be able to
| convince the user to not raise the alarm during the 2 week
| cooldown period.
|
| 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 - not enough is
| being done to prevent scammers from operating (why is it still
| possible for them to robocall and spoof UK numbers? why is
| there no AML/KYC equivalent before being able to place calls?)
| and getting away with it.
| pfranz wrote:
| > 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.
| avianlyric wrote:
| > I would expect the same social-engineering to be able to
| convince the user to not raise the alarm during the 2 week
| cooldown period.
|
| It would be interesting to test this. Having read through a
| number of APP fraud cases, including victim statements. One
| persistent theme is that the pressure cooker environment that
| scammers create to get victims to send money is very
| effective as getting them to ignore warning signs. But after
| they've sent the money, and the immediate pressure is off,
| they quickly realise they've been scammed.
|
| I strongly suspect that introducing even short delays of a
| few hours would be very effective. Especially if the victim
| is immediately made aware that a delay has been introduced.
| This give the victim a little time to cool-off and realise
| that they've been scammed, and then hopefully alert the bank.
| mvc wrote:
| Haha I wonder if you've read my case. I was scammed out of
| 100k this year.
|
| The scammer had control of my solicitor's email and timed
| the attack perfectly so I was absolutely convinced I was
| sending money to the right place.
|
| Didn't realize until a few days later when the solicitor
| called me wondering where the money was. The two week thing
| might have helped us but the scammer would probably just
| time their attack differently. Although it would increase
| the time they have to keep the fish on a hook.
| avianlyric wrote:
| Not sure if you managed to get your money back. But if
| you didn't, go research the contingent reimbursement
| model (CRM). Pretty much every major bank has signed up
| to it, and the CRM requires banks to reimburse victims,
| if the scam is sophisticated and the victim took
| reasonable steps to avoid the scam.
|
| A basic house deposit payment redirection scam should be
| covered, assuming you have evidence that the emails were
| sent from your solicitors email address.
| numair wrote:
| > 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
| always yell "no chargebacks!" when trying to attract people to
| their platforms, but chargebacks are actually a feature, not a
| bug -- for the very reason you just described.
|
| I don't like it, though. It seems totally inefficient, and
| there are better ways to do this.
|
| Edit: I want to add, because of chargebacks, any credit card
| processor that doesn't hold your money for, like, 6 months or
| whatever, is accepting the credit risk associated with what
| would happen if all of your transactions were charged back and
| you weren't good for the money. Hence why their risk management
| is a nightmare, and why anyone who enters that space ends up
| looking like a bad guy who arbitrarily freezes people's money
| (unless they choose to use humans rather than AI, but that
| doesn't "scale," right?).
| SkipperCat wrote:
| 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.
| kevincox wrote:
| 2 weeks to settle would be very annoying for people who are
| getting used to same-day shipping. It works when all of the
| goods are virtual/revocable but once you need to ship an actual
| product you want to be sure that you actually have the money
| (within some margin of error).
| antihero wrote:
| > 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..
|
| This would be extremely annoying. I hope it would be opt-out.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > The country is the global epicentre for such attacks
|
| Oh dear. So the country is the location several Km underground,
| that is the centre of the attacks?
|
| Why has every centre turned into an epicentre? Is "epicentre"
| easier to understand then "centre"?
| kasperni wrote:
| > 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."
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I think it can be easy to read things like this and see them as
| obvious scams but the fraudsters only need to trick a few
| people as the payout is large, and they are strongly
| incentivised to come up with the most optimised flow for
| scamming people.
| tblt wrote:
| This is an underrated observation - you could target 1000
| people for PS100 each, or you could put your time and effort
| into targeting and tricking the whale for PS100k, a payout
| worth putting the homework into.
| stormdennis wrote:
| I once made a fruitless suggestion that financial emergiencies
| should be treated the same as all others, ie diall911/999. When
| the operator would answer you'd say I've got a financial
| emergency and you'd be redirected appropriately. Further, I
| suggested that one's account should be deemed protected from the
| moment one dialled 911. That way, no matter how plausible the
| scammer sounded , everyone wouold know that a simple foolproof
| course of action was available, dial 911.
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| In a twist of irony, my 76 year old mother took in a immigrant
| who attended her church and was in a difficult situation. He'd
| come to the US on a lottery visa, was working and going to
| college while renting a room from her. After some years, it was
| time for his family to join him in the US. He flew to his home
| country of Cameroon to retrieve them, but the bribes he had to
| pay to get them out exceeded his cash on hand, and my mom needed
| to send him more money.
|
| You can imagine the conversation at the bank as they repeatedly
| refused to entertain her explanation, let alone wire the money.
| FinanceAnon wrote:
| What happened later? Did they manage to get out?
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| Yes, happily. She was finally able to get the transfer done
| at a different bank.
|
| Mom passed last year, and the heartfelt words from the entire
| family were the greatest tribute we could have asked for.
| happyflower wrote:
| Why can a 78-year old widow's life savings be managed through an
| online bank system?
|
| Bring back local branch offices where people have to manage their
| high-risk accounts in-person.
| adventured wrote:
| That's pretty interesting, because the US is often stereotyped
| for being aggressively cost-cutting in pursuit of margin. And
| yet in the middle of nowhere in the US local bank branches are
| still very common. I can easily get someone from my bank on the
| phone any time I need to. And if anyone attempts to move a
| large sum of money out of my account, the bank will promptly
| call me and freeze the action unless I allow it. Best of all
| the account is entirely free of fees with no minimum balance.
|
| That's still considered normal customer service by a local bank
| here in the US. I assume it degrades if you bank with one of
| the giants like Bank of America.
| dboreham wrote:
| The US has weird banking regulations dating back to the
| depression that lead to this situation. I'm sure banks in the
| US would love to close everything and consolidate into 2-3
| megabanks like in the UK.
| tblt wrote:
| > consolidate into 2-3 megabanks like in the UK
|
| The UK has greater industry competition in the form of
| challenger banks than the US
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Because in person banking services are really really expensive
| and no one will pay for them.
|
| Because you're not allowed to ban old people from your
| services.
|
| Because at least some old people use these things successfully
| and at least some young people get defrauded.
|
| Because UK banks are closed more than they are open (my local
| NatWest.
|
| People should be able to opt out. But that won't really help as
| the core issue here is the customers themselves...
| blackhaz wrote:
| You can't even talk to a live support person on the phone
| anymore. Just moved to the UK (from Czech Republic) and was
| shocked how everything is IVR here. We are all just numbers in
| the database here.
| nly wrote:
| For most of us avoiding telephone queues is a blessing.
|
| I have 3 "proper" bank accounts (different banks), a couple
| of "challenger"/app bank accounts, and 3 credit cards and
| haven't stepped foot in a branch to open or deal with any of
| them in 20 years. I've had to get on the telephone with a
| couple maybe a couple of times.
|
| I couldn't be happier with this arrangement, as long as
| someone is reachable when shit really does hit the fan.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Sure; and bring back bank charges for in-credit accounts.
| rwmj wrote:
| Banks make no money from retail customers as it is, they
| certainly aren't going to be reopening branches any time soon.
| bb101 wrote:
| 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.
| rwmj wrote:
| 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.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| Unless governments subsidize this, all this does is hurt
| small banks.
| jl6 wrote:
| You know the answer - because branchless operations are
| cheaper. If you want to mandate in-person transactions, who
| would you have pay the extra costs?
| erfgh wrote:
| Sounds like a business model, you can try it and see what
| happens.
| rwmj wrote:
| There's a challenger bank (aka startup) doing exactly that: h
| ttps://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-8595205/..
| .
| mdp2021 wrote:
| It is a huge problem if we cannot have vital services because
| they disappear. No banks given the trends, no cars given the
| trends, no documents given the trends... (In the terms of,
| many would not use a computer at all if the only option were
| UntrustedOS.) You can raise the issue of "more profits the
| other way", but it does not fully work ("dirt served at the
| restaurant, cheap and profitful") and an amount of people
| will remain serviceless.
| brightball wrote:
| > The country's super-fast payments infrastructure
|
| This is honestly one of those things that I never expected to
| read in a negative context...but it makes complete sense.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > "The UK is the hotbed of activity for fraudsters. Currently the
| UK accounts for about 80% of our global personal fraud losses,"
| it said.
|
| > The NECC's Reed said another problem was that just 1% of
| policing resources were dedicated to fighting fraud, despite it
| making up over a third of all crime in England and Wales.
|
| Astonishing, but in some ways not surprising given the Met's
| ability to cover for colossal failings like the Sarah Everard
| murder and the "spycops" fiasco.
|
| The political system is .. not in a position to improve this,
| despite it affecting a lot of the supposedly critical marginal
| elderly voters.
| robotmay wrote:
| 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,
| and not theirs for doing a direct bank transfer to some random
| person who told them it was an emergency. It is frustratingly
| hard to protect old people from this though - my nan got scammed
| for a new mattress by a door-to-door salesman when she was in a
| care home, who dropped the ball by letting him in at all. Another
| OAP I know would be a fairly easy target too, as she seems like
| she'd trust a "nice young man" more than her own family at this
| point (unwarranted, I should add).
|
| Our tech education in particular was fucking woeful when I was at
| school and I have to assume it's little better now. To me,
| avoiding scams seems fairly straightforward:
|
| 1) If it's too good to be true, it's not true.
|
| 2) Never fill out a form from a link in an email.
|
| 3) Don't provide any details to anyone who phones or emails you,
| always look up their official phone number and phone them back. I
| use multiple devices to do this and multiple sources to avoid
| compromised sites like one of the examples. Call up the directory
| service on the phone and compare that too, if needed.
|
| Perhaps there's also a cultural aspect to why the British are so
| easy to scam? Maybe our curious mix of laziness, stupidity,
| superiority complex, and greed combine to make us the perfect
| targets.
| avianlyric wrote:
| 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.
| robotmay wrote:
| It's tempting fate to say it, but I've not fallen for a scam,
| or a phishing attempt, and I've been subjected to many.
| Natural distrust and cynicism perhaps. I don't answer the
| phone to unknown numbers, I don't click links in emails, I
| don't do business at the door or over the phone, and I don't
| believe anything other people tell me (can report that my
| girlfriend hates this aspect of my personality).
|
| The head of accounts in my previous company fell for a bank
| transfer scam (urgent payment request forwarded "from the
| CEO"), so I have seen it happen to young people, but I
| wouldn't say that person was "tech savvy". Being able to use
| a computer doesn't make you tech savvy, and I would say the
| number of tech savvy people is probably close to identical
| between younger and older age groups. Being intelligent in
| one aspect doesn't make you smart at everything else (which
| is why I avoid doing plumbing). What is missing is critical
| thinking and cynicism. I highly doubt most people check the
| full email source of anything they receive that looks
| important, but they should. People rely too heavily on
| technology to tell them when something is wrong, and they
| shouldn't.
|
| The scam example you describe is easily avoided: don't enter
| your details in the fake package website in the first place.
| Don't answer the phone to the unknown number. Don't believe
| them when they say they're from the bank. Don't do anything
| anyone tells you to. And if they try to rush you, that should
| make you stop and think why.
|
| I don't doubt the scams are getting pretty clever, but that
| doesn't mean the victims can't also be a bit stupid. Yes it's
| sad that they have fallen for it, but to shift all the blame
| elsewhere is unfair - we are ultimately responsible for our
| own actions.
| pashamur wrote:
| Jim Browning (the renowned anti-scammer) recently fell for
| one of his own, where someone tricked him into disabling
| his Youtube account.
|
| So if the situation is right, almost anyone can fall for it
| (Gorilla on basketball court experiment)
| dazc wrote:
| 'Maybe our curious mix of laziness, stupidity, superiority
| complex, and greed combine to make us the perfect targets.'
|
| Or, maybe, our good manners?
| robotmay wrote:
| Hah yes I was trying to think of a way of describing that -
| our inability to be rude to people, or speak up about
| something that seems wrong. That should certainly be added to
| the list.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > our inability to be rude to people
|
| I don't seem to find that hard at all. And I meet many
| strangers that are rude (not all of them foreigners).
|
| It's true that brits hate complaining in restaurants. I
| don't think I've ever complained in a restaurant, despite
| my innate rudeness. But I find it very hard to keep my
| cool, when I've just listened to 30 minutes of hold music,
| and the person that picks up is an unhelpful numpty.
| retube wrote:
| > Maybe our curious mix of laziness, stupidity, superiority
| complex, and greed combine to make us the perfect targets.
|
| Such self-hatred only from a Labour voter I bet
| mvc wrote:
| The 3rd step above would have protected me but I'm not sure
| everyone would be so cautious as that.
|
| In my case, the attacker had control of my solicitor's email.
|
| A few days before he sent me a letter instructing me to deposit
| money to the correct account, the attacker sent an email from
| the solicitors email server (Dkim verified by Gmail), with a
| different account.
|
| This was in the context of a thread about the conveyancing on a
| house purchase so I was expecting to have to transfer money
| somewhere.
|
| I admit my own failure in the process but I think there's room
| for improvement in the whole process of buying a house too
| (like why don't solicitors get buyers to enter the correct
| account info proactively at the beginning of the process)
| bluedino wrote:
| 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
| robotmay wrote:
| 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
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Perhaps there's also a cultural aspect to why the British are
| so easy to scam?
|
| Ongoing transition from "high trust" to "low trust" society.
| People don't yet expect to be scammed, but trust in
| institutions and the rest of the public is falling.
| vanilla-almond wrote:
| A recent new scam is delivery text (SMS) messages [1]. You are
| expecting a parcel delivery and receive a text message saying you
| have missed a delivery. The text asks you to rearrange delivery
| by paying for the cost of re-delivery. The link takes you to a
| scam website asking for payment from which you enter card
| details.
|
| I have had these scam delivery text messages. On one occasion, I
| almost fell for it because the scam text message coincided with
| an expected parcel delivery. The text messages randomly target
| people without knowing whether people are expecting parcels, but
| it undoubtedly succeeds in tricking some people who are genuinely
| expecting a parcel.
|
| [1] _Delivery text scams: the nasty new fraud wave sweeping the
| UK_ : https://www.theguardian.com/money/2021/may/18/delivery-
| text-...
| nly wrote:
| This is presumably easier because via SMS use of an url
| shortener would be the norm.
| valdiorn wrote:
| yup, now with EU/Brexit import duties and VAT on everything,
| the carriers (DHL/UPS/FedEx) have been made responsible for
| collecting the fees on the govts. behalf, but they also don't
| want to slow down delivery, stop it at customs, send a letter
| to you, wait 3 days for you to pay, etc - so they send a text
| with a link to a really shady payment gateway where they tell
| you there's a fee to pay. Mind you, this is what the legitimate
| carriers do.
|
| After that, it was easy for fraudsters to just spam links to
| everyone to similar looking pages. I often have 5-6 pending
| order now, since COVID I buy literally everything online, and I
| can't keep track of everything that's inbound. I'm sure a lot
| of people are in a similar situation, which makes this scam
| very effective.
| nly wrote:
| This only makes sense if the courier has your digital contact
| info. Some of them don't even hold your parcel now, they just
| send it anyway, alongside an invoice with the duties due.
| azalemeth wrote:
| It utterly infuriates me that banks won't let you use their
| mobile apps -- which are inevitably their websites packaged in a
| bundle, with added tracking -- on a rooted (or jailbroken) phone,
| even though I am sure that the overwhelming majority of users on
| android who have a rooted device are likely to be the most
| technically sophisticated, with (in my case) the presence of mind
| to install updates to their four-year-old but perfectly usable
| device that would otherwise be considered EOL by its
| manufacturer. Meanwhile, the banks are expanding the contactless
| limit to PS300 -- despite academics showing that covert antennas
| can do "wallet sniping" easily -- and have a horrendous attitude
| to security. 2FA is entirely based around random numbers and
| "Private Number" caller-ID barred phone numbers -- meaning that
| if someone was spoofing your account details, you'd never know.
| Their fraud detection algorithms tend to be quite good, but only
| if "your" criminal has stereotypical tastes -- I've been called
| up after _I_ bought a computer at the apple store, for example,
| which is in-keeping with me, but not when my card was cloned and
| someone bought lots of drinks at a Weatherspoons.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _expanding the contactless limit ... wallet sniping_
|
| I am quite interested in the security details of NFC.
|
| Where is the best information you found? Unfortunately my
| searches found too little.
|
| BTW: apparently someone managed to use a fault in the protocol
| to steal well more than the limit. And by the way, if any
| product proposer mentions a "limit", in order not to be
| brainless they must also mention a "rate" (e.g. 10EUR _per
| hour_ ), and I have never seen anyone do it.
| babayega2 wrote:
| Two days ago, I purchased a subscription online and my bank app
| thought it was a security incident, blocked the transaction and
| discarded the online virtual card I was using, informed me about
| the whole process and asked me to create another virtual card to
| replace all my other 6 subscriptions that were linked to the now
| defunct card.
|
| I'm discovering Revolut.
| tblt wrote:
| Are you saying this is a good feature of Revolut, or that
| you'll be switching to Revolut because of this incident?
| Personally I'd be happy with this level of fraud protection, as
| a previous victim of fraud.
| FerretFred wrote:
| For too long, the onus has been on us, the bank customer to prove
| our identity using a series of "security" questions. However, we
| can't actually prove that _they_ really are our bank: AFAIK
| there's no mechanism in place.
|
| So how about a facility for setting up a passphrase on your
| account that _you_ could ask the bank for?
|
| "I'm your bank".. "What's the passphrase?" "errrrr...." "goodbye
| scammer".
| [deleted]
| enlyth wrote:
| https://archive.is/K3Vli
| mysterypie wrote:
| 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: The crooks cashed out the victim's $270,000 at ATMs.
| That means they set up 270 fraudulent bank accounts, each tied to
| a separate ATM card, and each with a withdrawal limit of $1000.
| There should be a cornucopia of leads to follow. It's a major
| hassle to set up a bank account. You need an address at which to
| receive each one of those 270 ATM cards. Did the bank(s) send 270
| cards to one single mailing address? Were these online accounts
| or did the crooks visit each bank with fake IDs? What did the
| surveillance cameras at the ATMs show? If they hired duped people
| to cash out at the ATMs, can't the police catch at least one of
| those persons and continue following the money?
|
| Scenario 2: The crooks create one master British bank account
| into which the stolen money is funneled (say $1,000,000) and then
| they transfer the money to overseas to Third World Bank. Why
| doesn't the British bank (or the British government) demand that
| the $1,000,000 be returned by Third World Bank? It's now the
| Third World country's job to track down the crooks if they want
| to. If they won't return the funds, they get blacklisted by the
| British banking system.
|
| Perhaps there are very good answers about why and how the crooks
| can get away with it but it seems so implausible when money has
| been so traceable for the last 20 or 30 years (except for certain
| cryptocurrencies but that's recent).
| kasperni wrote:
| > 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."
| mysterypie wrote:
| Granted that in this case it was a cryptocurrency account,
| but I've seen dozens of articles like this over the years in
| which cryptocurrency was not mentioned or didn't even exist
| yet.
| [deleted]
| woodruffw wrote:
| > 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.
|
| It's not really like this. Banks (and Western) governments are
| extremely meticulous about _recording_ financial transactions,
| but have relatively few systems for actually retrieving that
| information for _proactive_ law enforcement. There are large
| historical and technical barriers that prevent meaningful
| advances in the government 's ability to surveil bank accounts
| in real time.
|
| As just one example: interbank settlement over ACH is measured
| in _days_ , not seconds or even hours. During settlement,
| anything can happen: the ODFI might try to claw the transaction
| back, either institution can go bankrupt, the destination
| account might close, etc. A human frequently intervenes to
| handle these cases. Banking is _eventually_ consistent, but the
| fraudster is frequently long gone by that point.
|
| Edit: it's also worth noting that "anonymous" (read: numbered)
| banking is also really only good for Doing Crime (and Having
| Crime Done to You). But plenty of countries, including the US,
| allow you to open bank accounts (and do debit transactions)
| without an official government ID.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| >Considering that all Western governments have achieved total
| surveillance on our banking
|
| You're so far away from the truth. Basically, they have
| flashlight and they are in dark forest. You can theoretically
| find what you want, but it's fairly unlikely and very time
| consuming.
| avianlyric wrote:
| Go and look up the concept of money mules. Fraudsters don't
| need to setup bank accounts, they either buy bank accounts off
| people for PS50, or convince people to move the money on their
| behalf by claiming they're doing an "accounting" job that
| involves large money movements, and the mule will get paid a
| percentage.
|
| Most people don't realise what these accounts are used for, or
| just don't care because they're paid enough to look the other
| way. Then stolen funds are quickly moved across dozens of
| banks, with the money being split and re-combined with
| potentially legitimate money. Eventually the administrative
| overhead of tracking the money gets so great that no one bank
| can be bothered to do anything about, and the police aren't
| interested in actually investigating. The end result is that
| once the stolen money if a dozen or so bank accounts away from
| the victim, it's extremely unlikely that anyone is actually
| going to trace the money to that account, effectively making
| the money clean.
| robinson-wall wrote:
| You see ads on instagram offering to buy or borrow your bank
| account for PS50... and when they're used for muling guess
| who it is that gets their account banned and then a CIFAS
| marker ensuring they can't bank anywhere else? The desperate
| kid who needed the money, not the actual criminals behind it.
| q1w2 wrote:
| Acting as a mule for money laundering is a crime. They are
| criminals. They might be young, but the majority of them
| know they are doing something wrong.
| robinson-wall wrote:
| I'm not suggesting they aren't criminals. But there is a
| spectrum of criminality and I am suggesting they are
| considerably less so than the leaders of the fraud ring.
|
| These ads are deliberately designed to prey on the
| desperate, unfortunate or the technically illiterate.
|
| Some of them probably know exactly what they're doing and
| I have no sympathy, but some of them probably fall into
| the same category as people falling for Authorised Push
| Payment fraud.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Isn't that true for all types of crime?
|
| In the worst cases the accepted practice can be as severe
| as locking them up and throw the key away, even if it was
| totally unintentional.
|
| Like a drunk driver plowing into a group of school
| children, or a ship captain that sinks a cruise ship
| while distracted.
|
| Having extra scrutiny imposed on future banking activity
| is a minor punishment for a minor crime.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Yet another reason for regulating advertising. Why are
| these platforms not held liable as accomplices? I can't
| think of any legitimate reason for an ad to buy/rent
| someone's bank account.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| At least in my experience these aren't official ads. It's
| random sketchy people posting about "business
| opportunities" with stacks of cash or whatever.
| everdrive wrote:
| > Considering that all Western governments have achieved total
| surveillance on our banking
|
| > and made it impossible to have anonymous bank accounts,
|
| These are not the same things, as anyone who works in logging
| and tracking will tell you. Just because there is some tracking
| of you, or an ability to track you does not mean that all
| activity could be noted or flagged. If I purchase from a new
| online vendor, how would my bank know if it was me or not?
| jliptzin wrote:
| Or what about Nigeria and India based scam artists ripping off
| thousands and thousands of elderly Americans on a daily basis?
| I think in India it's turned into an entire industry by now. Is
| there really nothing American law enforcement can do about it
| or are they just asleep at the wheel?
| coolspot wrote:
| US authorities pass leads to Indian/Nigerian authorities
| which are paid off to do nothing.
| swutas wrote:
| It's well documented that a lot of this money goes out of the
| country by transferring it to a 'mule' with a bank account in
| the UK, who think they are doing something innocuous. They
| transfer it to the scammers either via cryptocurrency
| (basically untraceable) or previously, via an international
| money transfer service such as Western Union. The latter is
| also pretty much untraceable. You can pick up money anywhere in
| the world from these services with some ID. They don't need
| your address or to really check you are who you say you are,
| they just want to make sure you have the same name as the one
| the sender referenced.
|
| Unless the destination country, the destination Western Union
| office _and_ the person who picked up the money are all willing
| and able to co-operate, law enforcement in the source country
| is pretty much stuck.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > doing something innocuous. They transfer it to the scammers
| either via cryptocurrency
|
| Whoah. Do you mean there are people that think cryptocurrency
| is "inoccuous"? I mean, I know there are inoccuous uses; but
| if someone "official" tells you to use a cryptocurrency
| account, that is very definitely occuous.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Sorry for replying to self.
|
| TIL: I have been spelling "innocuous" wrong since forever.
| It's apparently the negating prefix "in-", and the Latin
| word "nocere" (to harm).
|
| So I should have quipped "that is very definitely nocuous".
| Or not quipped at all.
| ryanlol wrote:
| There are organizations creating thousands of bank accounts to
| cash out transactions like this for a percentage. They use fake
| IDs, there's no way to stop them.
|
| Catching the people opening the accounts leads you to nowhere,
| they rarely even know their bosses.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| There is a way to catch fake IDs besides ML and MRZ parsing,
| but this would require govt to allow banks to use their ID
| database.
| ryanlol wrote:
| Never gonna happen internationally. We barely managed to
| push through cryptographically signed passports after 9/11,
| and even those aren't very well adopted (you will never
| face issues if your passport has a "faulty" chip)
| nikanj wrote:
| Scenario 3: Unsuspecting people are recruited to get "Bitcoin
| management operator" jobs, where they receive funds on their
| account, buy bitcoin with said funds and send the coins over.
|
| In the past, the same mules were sending Western money
| transfers or similar, but nowadays cryptos are so handy most
| criminals have migrated to it.
|
| After a few months the cops usually come knocking, and
| depending on the jurisdiction, the poor mule is hit with
| fine/jailtime and/or the debt
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Unpopular opinion time: I'm not convinced people should be
| reimbursed for this so long as the bank have warned them in
| writing and in the app.
|
| No one should keep big chunks of cash just in accounts.
|
| Everyone should be well aware by now of the scams.
| rsync wrote:
| When I make a mortgage payment at usbank, I am redirected through
| two additional third party domains that have no obvious
| connection to either usbank or banking in general.
|
| They are training their users to get phished.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Oh, Mastercard and Visa do this systematically. You get
| redirected to a site whose name I can't remember, that has no
| apparent relationship with either Visa or Mastercard, that asks
| you to input some piece of personal info.
|
| I've sometimes aborted purchase transactions with significant
| value on being confronted by that challenge.
|
| It's a bit like handing your card to a teller, inputting your
| pin, and then the teller passing you on to some rando asking
| personal questions.
| bob229 wrote:
| The British public is exceptionally stupid
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