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An unprecedented wave of online bank fraud is hitting Britain
- happyflower 5y agoWhy 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.
- denton-scratch 5y agoSure; and bring back bank charges for in-credit accounts.
- LatteLazy 5y agoBecause 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 5y agoYou 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 5y agoFor 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.
- rwmj 5y agoBanks make no money from retail customers as it is, they certainly aren't going to be reopening branches any time soon.
- bb101 5y agoThat'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 5y agoIs 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 5y agoUnless governments subsidize this, all this does is hurt small banks.
- jl6 5y agoYou 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 5y agoSounds like a business model, you can try it and see what happens.
- mdp2021 5y agoIt 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.
- rwmj 5y agoThere's a challenger bank (aka startup) doing exactly that: https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-8595205/Metro-Bank-swings-240m-loss.html https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-8595205/...
- adventured 5y agoThat'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 5y agoThe 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 5y ago> consolidate into 2-3 megabanks like in the UK The UK has greater industry competition in the form of challenger banks than the US
- stormdennis 5y agoI 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.
- jmugan 5y agoI 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.
- enlyth 5y agohttps://archive.is/K3Vli https://archive.is/K3Vli
- rwmj 5y agoThe 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 5y agoThe 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 5y agoPractically what happens if you're defrauded is your local police force will direct you to Action Fraud (https://www.actionfraud.police.uk/ 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 https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.actionfraud.police.uk
- samhw 5y agoYeah, 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 5y ago> 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.
- Johnyma22 5y agoBritain 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.
- blfr 5y agoWhy would brexit impact police interactions with other commonwealth countries. Or even global policing.
- PeterisP 5y agoAFAIK 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 5y agoBecause 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 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-56529359
- Chris2048 5y agoHow are these databases used to police/punish the stereotypical Nigerian scammer?
- lol768 5y agoAll the major banks offer Confirmation of Payee nowadays. Why are people still falling victim to APP?
- LatteLazy 5y agoThey 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.
- robotmay 5y agoI 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
- Nextgrid 5y agoI 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.
- simonvc 5y agoHow 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
- numair 5y ago> 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 5y agoMy 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.
- kasperni 5y ago> 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 5y agoI 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 5y agoThis is an underrated observation - you could target 1000 people for £100 each, or you could put your time and effort into targeting and tricking the whale for £100k, a payout worth putting the homework into.
- robotmay 5y agoOoh 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.
- retube 5y ago> 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
- dazc 5y ago'Maybe our curious mix of laziness, stupidity, superiority complex, and greed combine to make us the perfect targets.' Or, maybe, our good manners?
- robotmay 5y agoHah 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.
- jonatron 5y agoPart 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 5y agoI 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 5y agoYeah 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 5y agoYou 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 5y agoIn 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.
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- herunan 5y agothe amount of phishing texts I’ve been getting is crazy, and I’m very careful about sharing my number.
- IshKebab 5y agoUltimately 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 5y agoYeah 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 5y agoI 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 £30 payment in a city restaurant. I'm no longer with them.
- kennydude 5y agoMonzo has some app integration with their phone staff too. They can send push notifications to open the app to a certain point etc,
- rlpb 5y agoI think this is a regulatory failure. Banks should be stopped, by regulation, from doing things that harm public expectations in this way.
- Angostura 5y agoI 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.
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoBank 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 5y agoUnless the fraudulent transaction is due to the fact you just lost your credit card.
- burnished 5y agoThe 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.
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoWell 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.
- pjc50 5y ago> "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.
- mysterypie 5y agoWhat'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).
- KptMarchewa 5y ago>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.
- nikanj 5y agoScenario 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
- vanilla-almond 5y agoA 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-scams-the-nasty-new-wave-sweeping-the-uk https://www.theguardian.com/money/2021/may/18/delivery-text-...
- valdiorn 5y agoyup, 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 5y agoThis 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.
- nly 5y agoThis is presumably easier because via SMS use of an url shortener would be the norm.
- FerretFred 5y agoFor 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".
- 11thEarlOfMar 5y agoIn 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 5y agoWhat happened later? Did they manage to get out?
- 11thEarlOfMar 5y agoYes, 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.
- LatteLazy 5y agoUnpopular 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.
- azalemeth 5y agoIt 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 £300 -- 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 5y ago> 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. 10€ per hour), and I have never seen anyone do it.
- azalemeth 5y agoHere are a few articles -- admittedly several are quite old, but I am sure I have seen more than this elsewhere. They either discuss attacks, or attack mitigations. -- "Contactless payment data can be picked up at a distance" (2013) https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-24743920 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-24743920 -- "Mobile device prevention of contactless card attacks", US patent, 2014; https://patents.google.com/patent/US9379841B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9379841B2/en -- "Proximity verification for contactless card control and authentication systems", Proc. Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, 2015; https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2818000.2818004 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2818000.2818004 -- Finally, a fairly good review article: "internet of Smart Cards: a pocket attacks scenario"; Intl. J. Critical Infrastructure Protection; 2019; https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1874548219300642 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187454821...
- mFixman 5y agoI 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 5y agoThe 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.
- brightball 5y ago> 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.
- babayega2 5y agoTwo 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.
- rsync 5y agoWhen 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 5y agoOh, 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.
- denton-scratch 5y ago> 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"?
- baldyman 5y agoBecause: 'The country is the global centre for such attacks' just sounds false, or at least unsubstantiated. Whereas 'country is the epicentre' is more obviously intended as hyperbole.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bob229 5y agoThe British public is exceptionally stupid