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'Kafkaesque': bank blocks cash transfer, saying it could be an AI scam

73 points by chrisjj 2y ago

perihelions 2y ago
- "“Conversations with their fraud team by phone and text over a period of several hours became progressively more Kafkaesque, including the bizarre suggestion that Zoom conversations with my friend could have been generated by scammers using AI,” he says." For him to call that suggestion "bizarre" indicates how badly out-of-touch and vulnerable he is to standard 2020's fraud techniques. But banks should never be allowed to demand private communications; it's a gross indignity and a violation of the very fundamental right of private correspondence. The professor is not wrong to compare to that East German society. - "but still demanded to see my Austrian’s friend’s tax bill, and past examples of our correspondence."
- croes 2y ago
  Especially they shouldn't treat their customers like children. Warn him of the possible fraud, let him sign some form of agreement but then send the money.
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    The point is that they have no idea who they are warning of fraud.
    - wruza 2y ago
      I don’t think that’s the point, unless their protocols allow to disclose information to and request proofs from a presumably omnipotent ai scammer.
  - tsukikage 2y ago
    > Warn him of the possible fraud, let him sign some form of agreement Unfortunately, banks that used to take this approach have been stung by people who listened to the warning, signed the agreement, got defrauded, sued the bank /and won/.
    - croes 2y ago
      Blocking a customer to access his money is also a reason to sue and as a bigger negative effect on other customers. I think most people would be surprised you can win a case if you have been warned. But if you block my money that's a lot bigger issue.
  - miohtama 2y ago
    The new UK law does not allow this, the new passed law is explicit that banks are forced to reimburse. Revolut customers are forced to take selfies "this is a scam" and they still send the money, and ask it back: https://x.com/moo9000/status/1790275729634029798 https://x.com/moo9000/status/1790275729634029798 As discussed in length in here (now downvoted): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41273554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41273554
- viraptor 2y ago
  > For him to call that suggestion "bizarre" indicates how badly out-of-touch and vulnerable he is to standard 2020's fraud techniques. I think we're missing a lot of context to say that here. It really depends on whether it was a quick one-off contact about just this issue, or their weekly one hour call. He may be well aware of the tech and know why it doesn't apply in this case.
- pbhjpbhj 2y ago
  I felt like the [mock?] indignation that it might be possible to clone a persons voice - at telephone compression levels - showed that the person did not have sufficient grasp of the situation to know if they were being scammed. The article says "Having had several telephone calls to establish it was actually her asking for help" and then later that it was "Zoom" sugguesting that it was Zoom audio-only calls. What would be the harm in having the Austrian government confirm the debt here, supposedly the friend, the customer, and the bank all know about it already. Or indeed what would be the harm in sharing the communications -- why would you not want to. Being set against it would suggest something like the messages saying "don't share these messages" which would be a massive fraud flag. We don't learn if the "Edinburgh academic" was ripped off or not. Aside, anyone have an insight into how do you suddenly get a "tax bill" from the Austrian government for 15k Euro?
  - vidarh 2y ago
    > Aside, anyone have an insight into how do you suddenly get a "tax bill" from the Austrian government for 15k Euro? Extra income from contracts and failed to set aside enough? I've had big tax bills before, it's not that unusual, and I'd get the temptation of dipping into money set aside if subsequent income has been lower than expected. But tax authorities do tend to be flexible about repayment plans most places. Maybe that's not true for Austria. The bigger issue there for me, though, is that a scammer is not going to hesitate to fake a tax bill. Why the bank think that would prove anything suggests to me they haven't thought this through very well either.
    - henearkr 2y ago
      No, nowadays many official documents come with a URL (often in the form of a QR code) linking to a digital copy of the document stored on a governmental server.
      - vidarh 2y ago
        I have literally never seen this. I don't doubt it can happen, but for that to work it'd rely on the fraud team to 1) know exactly what a letter from the Austrian tax office should look like to notice if there isn't a URL if those letters do have one, 2) if the scammers were to include one, it'd require them to be certain enough about the URL that pointing it to a suitable fake one would be insufficient. I'm not convinced the fraud team wouldn't be easily fooled, in other words. Not that I'd want to try; but for someone already breaking the law there's little reason not to.
- vidarh 2y ago
  The thing is, if this involved voice cloning, seeing past examples of their correspondence would do very little. Past correspondence would rule out only the scenario where he is actively lying to the bank about this being an old friend... It seems like even if their concern might have some legitimate basis to it, they don't think through the scenarios very well.
henearkr 2y ago
To be honest, it sounds like it could be the friend in Austria who fell into a scam, and is thus left with cash flow problems. Victims in these situations are pushed to beg money from their family and friends.
wruza 2y ago
Sounded okayish until the part where they froze his account after he decided to close it out of frustration. Imagine saying you don’t want to deal with them only to find a pacifier in your mouth. Kafkaesque indeed.
- feintruled 2y ago
  I read that as him trying to move his money to another bank that would allow him to make the transfer. His current bank suspected this and wouldn't let him even close his account. So they confiscated his money to prevent someone else supposedly stealing his money - pretty Kafkaesque I think
mjburgess 2y ago
The bank should offer some sort of e-learning training which a customer can click through that shows all the relevant sorts of scams and why their money is being held up. If the customer confirms that they believe they are not a victim of any of these scams (etc.); and they confirm their identity (etc.); then the money should go through. The bank cannot decide on your behalf what you do with your money.
- pbhjpbhj 2y ago
  The customer should confirm "I know this is a scam, release my money anyway, I take full responsibility". It's necessary to release the bank from any liability in this sort of situation. From the article it sounds like a scam.
  - Deathmax 2y ago
    As I understand it, UK banks (where this article is written) will soon be required[1] to reimburse victims of Authorised Push Payment fraud (some banks are signed up for a voluntary code at the moment) outside of "gross negligence" by the customer, so they can't just allow customers to waive liability. Making transfers now involves multi step questionnaires with big scary warnings about scams at every stage. [1]: https://www.psr.org.uk/publications/policy-statements/ps233-fighting-authorised-push-payment-fraud-a-new-reimbursement-requirement/ https://www.psr.org.uk/publications/policy-statements/ps233-...
    - TacticalCoder 2y ago
      > Making transfers now involves multi step questionnaires with big scary warnings about scams at every stage. I keep screenshots of banking websites warning about scams and phishing attempts as well as screenshots of articles in online newspapers about phishing attacks being on the rise. It's pure insanity.
      - chrisjj 2y ago
        > I keep screenshots of banking websites Then don't succumb to the banks pressure to switch to their mobile apps - which block screenshotting.
immibis 2y ago
I see no difference between what John actually said, and what John would say if he was a victim of a scam. Scammers do convince their victims that they are friends, in far away places. Sometimes they spend months building up this false friendship before asking for money. A giveaway is that you've never actually met the person. A simple "I've known him since childhood" or "I've met him in real life" would have cleared that up.
- vidarh 2y ago
  They, however, do not keep this up for 20 years: > MacInnes’s “crime” was to try to send money to a friend he and his wife have known for more than 20 years
  - immibis 2y ago
    Did the bank know that?
    - vidarh 2y ago
      Did they not know that? You're moving the goalposts. You said you saw no difference between what he said and what victim of a scammer would. You've inferred from the article what you imagine he said. The article has the 20 years bit, and yes, we have no evidence he told the bank, but neither do we have evidence he didn't, and your only basis for assuming one and not the other is your own biases. It's fair to question whether he gave them that info, but not for just assuming he didn't.
miohtama 2y ago
[flagged]
- kchr 2y ago
  > The consequence is that the cost of stupid, scammed, customers is passed to all customers, including those that do not send money to scammers. What you conveniently left out in that cost calculation are the thousands of elderly and mentally ill people falling victims of such scammers. And who are these "stupid" people you mention anyway? Everybody knows social engineering is getting harder and harder to identify, considering how technology advances (spoofing SMS/caller ID, deepfakes, AI etc)
  - miohtama 2y ago
    The fraud can be tackle other ways than making banks to pay for the fraud. There are tons of ways like extra confirmations of the payment, thresholds on daily payments, payment delays or just having a setting in your bank account that you are allowed to make "high risk" payments. But if you want to make the society to pay for vulnerable people, victims and friendly fraud, if we want to protect the eldery and others, these people can take an insurance against scams if they feel they are a vulnerable group. This is not a health issue, this is not a physical threat. This is not an epidemic. There is a cost of giving free insurance to these people, and a lot of them won't be eldery but the abusers fo the system. This was discussed in the article of Financial Times, and based on the news link, there is also a massive indirect cost for people by creating the unbalanced system of fraud reimbursement. 1 out of 8 UK people commit fraud, so banks can now prepare feel the cost of this new form of friendly fraud: https://www.cifas.org.uk/newsroom/fraudbehaviours23 https://www.cifas.org.uk/newsroom/fraudbehaviours23
    - kchr 2y ago
      Yeah, I realise now that I read your reply my message was just questioning the broad blame on so called "stupid people", without discussing the responsibility part of it. I absolutely agree the banks should implement more preventive measures to combat fraud where possible. In many cases, fraud is obvious from the bank's perspective but might not be from the victim's, for many reasons.
navaed01 2y ago
If you’ve ever been unjustly completely locked out of your finances for an extended period, it’s a bizarre experience and a wake up call. I once had a purely online bank ask me to prove my identity by mailing a copy of my passport. The only issue was they were asking me to prove I was someone else (they sent an email to me, but referencing someone else’s name in the email). They then locked me out because I didn’t respond fast enough and took that as suspicious activity. When I tried to explain I couldn’t prove I was someone I was not, they tried to skirt the fact they had messed up. Point being - banks need to protect our money, but banks make lots of silly mistakes that can ultimately harm the people they are trying to protect
- Foobar8568 2y ago
  Someone opened a bank account using my email. Bank rejected the fault on google who created a duplicate account and I was somehow accessing the other person email. Yeah sure buddy, they stopped their bullshit when I claimed I was going to contact the local authority.
  - netsharc 2y ago
    Reminds me of getting someone's phone bills in my email (say it's foobar@gmail.com) because they thought their e-mail is foo.bar@gmail.com (GMail ignores dots in email addresss). I emailed the phone company telling them I'm not that guy, and they replied saying "Well as you can see we sent the mail to foo.bar@gmail.com, and that's not you".. OK genius, how did it arrive in my inbox, then? After 3 more of these I just set up a rule to immediately trash emails from them.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- derf_ 2y ago
  This is a great reason to not put all of your financial eggs in one basket. You hear stories around here all of the time about people's businesses being ruined by Google's automated abuse systems and lack of customer support. There might only be one Google, but there are a lot of banks. They might all have similar policies, but at least it is less likely they will all try to screw you over at the same time. If you have rainy-day savings for at least six months of expenses (as everyone is advised to do), there is no reason you cannot split those up.
pbhjpbhj 2y ago
The only way to solve this that I can see is if the bank could confirm: 1) that the account being payed into belongs to the friend (so they can ask the name from the customer, and say 'that is [not] the name on the account') 2) confirm the tax liability (eg the Austrian gov provided a limited time hash-based URL where the bank could check a limited amount of the friends records; somewhat like sharing driving license details with car rental companies) To me, this would not be intrusive, assuming that there was a ledger (blockchain) in which the accesses were recorded and the bank was under a massive penalty (compensation to customer and penalty charge paid to the state) for any unnecessary accesses.
- JadeNB 2y ago
  > 2) confirm the tax liability (eg the Austrian gov provided a limited time hash-based URL where the bank could check a limited amount of the friends records; somewhat like sharing driving license details with car rental companies) Why should this be required? If I want to send money to my friend because I like them and want to give them money, then the bank should have no role beyond verifying that I am sending it to the person I intended. I shouldn't only be able to send money to address an immediately provable tax liability.
  - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
    Yes, fair enough if you're sure it's your friend and that they're not being ripped off.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
daviddoran 2y ago
A family member works in banking phone support and the scams people get caught by are unbelievable. Every week people are convinced by scammers to give their bank cards to a taxi that arrives at their house (supposedly sent by the bank), they transfer 1,000s of euro to foreign bank accounts (supposedly at the request of the bank to safeguard the funds), they lie to the bank (somehow convinced by the scammers), etc.
- Nextgrid 2y ago
  That's a symptom of law enforcement having dropped the ball for over a decade. There is no way in hell anyone would dare send a taxi "sent by the bank" to pick up scam proceeds in a society with a functioning law enforcement system because the scam victim would be a honeypot most of the time and whoever shows up would be arrested & jailed (and likely rat out the rest of his crew).
  - LeafItAlone 2y ago
    > because the scam victim would be a honeypot most of the time The pool of potential victims is the entire population with a bank account, meaning at least the majority of adults. The percentage that would fall of it and agree is certainly not 100%, but it is definitely higher than I personally expected years ago. That still results in a ton of possible victims. Give such a large pool, how can a police honeypot be the scam victim “most of the time”?
    - Nextgrid 2y ago
      Scammers need to reach the victim somehow. How they do this currently is either robocalls (call every single potential number in a loop), social media or advertising. If every disconnected number leads to a police-run honeypot that would play along (easy with the carriers' cooperation), police running bait social media accounts to get scammers to approach them, and proactively crawling scam-prone keywords for any scam ads to follow up on, the scammers will likely all get arrested before they'd even reach a single real victim. Most importantly, the mere fact this is happening would have a deterrent effect and effectively put a stop to such scam operations because even ignoring the risk of arrest, it's simply not profitable if the majority of your scam attempts go to law enforcement who simply wastes your time.
s1mon 2y ago
Try buying property for the first time. After having successfully wire transferred the 3% deposit to the escrow company, we tried to transfer the remaining amount of the down payment, and the bank just refused. They wouldn’t tell us in detail why but it seemed that a third party analysis service had flagged it as risky. We had to first wire transfer to another bank account with our lender (a different bank from where we had our cash to close), and that bank finally allowed the transfer to the escrow company. It felt really scary when we first were denied the ability to transfer our own money. Each wire transfer takes days, not minutes, and there were moments where it seemed like the money didn’t exist at the sending or receiving bank, so it made closing in 21 days a lot harder and more stressful than we expected.
- ashkankiani 2y ago
  I only realized after leaving the US how insanely slow transfers are there. In Hong Kong, transfers are basically instant. In Japan they often finish within 10 minutes. HSBC HK's daily transfer limit (not FPS) for me is about 3m HKD ~ 385k USD. I've transferred 30k within seconds to IBKR before.
  - matwood 2y ago
    I've also had US bank wires be nearly instant. It all depends on how much and if it triggers additional fraud checks.
  - TacticalCoder 2y ago
    > I've transferred 30k within seconds to IBKR before. 30 K EUR using instant SEPA tx? Transferring EUR to IBKR takes about one to two days for me so YMMV. As for the daily limit, it really depends on the bank and how much you have there: at one bank of mine I can tx up to 125 K EUR from the banking's website myself. At another bank I'm stuck at 5 K EUR max (!) and the option to raise that limit to 25 K EUR ain't working for me.
    - vidarh 2y ago
      Some of those limits are insidious because they risk causing people to trigger fraud checks for structuring/smurfing (doing multiple transfers below the reporting limits to avoid them), so by setting low limits they risk causing innocent users to inadvertently engage in behaviours that'll cause problems.
heraldgeezer 2y ago
Swedish TV recently sent an investigative episode on these phone bank scams. "Swedish" people in Spain send out mass SMS to people with a fake purchase order and phone number. Call the number you get to the scammers that say "Looks like your account got hacked if you did not order this, we will transfer you to your bank" The "transfer" is to another scammer who gets the person to transfer money from their account (who they think is hacked) to a "safe account" (the scammers account) So the scams are getting more and more sophisticated. So I DO understand the bank thinking this is a scam. That is a large sum of money. Usually requires an invoice. See is here (swedish only) https://www.svtplay.se/video/KVk3QWv/uppdrag-granskning/bedragarna https://www.svtplay.se/video/KVk3QWv/uppdrag-granskning/bedr...
Nextgrid 2y ago
The root cause of the issue here is that enforcement against scams no longer exists, so banks have no choice but to take matters into their own hands to try and prevent their customers from falling victim to one. In a functioning society scams wouldn't be as prevalent because law enforcement would take prompt and proactive action (which also acts as a deterrent and reduces the number of scams further) and thus banks wouldn't need to do this because getting scammed would be such a rare occurrence.
- miohtama 2y ago
  This is the UK. The root cause is that the new UK law forces banks to reimburse any transaction. More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41273554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41273554 Of course banks would not want to go kafka, but members of parliaments decided so and regulators forces banks in the turn. So point the finger at the regulators.
- Ferret7446 2y ago
  It's not just scams. There could be many reasons why a bank would freeze "your" money. There have been many cases, some recent, and some recently in developed/first world countries without due process, of governments telling banks to freeze someone's money because you did something the government didn't like. If you give your money away, then it's not really your money. If the other person doesn't given it back, are you going to force them to? Are you going to tell the regional controller of force to them them to do so? What if it's that entity that doesn't like you?
  - JetSpiegel 2y ago
    > you did something the government didn't like Like storming the US Capitol, or blocking Canadian roads, these kinds of "political views"?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
TacticalCoder 2y ago
Speaking of which, here's the article about banks in the UK now being forced to reimburse scam victims: https://archive.is/iNupf https://archive.is/iNupf Anyone knows what the situation is in the EU regarding this? Do banks in the EU (or the Eurozone) have to reimburse scam victims too?

73 points by chrisjj 2y ago

- "“Conversations with their fraud team by phone and text over a period of several hours became progressively more Kafkaesque, including the bizarre suggestion that Zoom conversations with my friend could have been generated by scammers using AI,” he says." For him to call that suggestion "bizarre" indicates how badly out-of-touch and vulnerable he is to standard 2020's fraud techniques. But banks should never be allowed to demand private communications; it's a gross indignity and a violation of the very fundamental right of private correspondence. The professor is not wrong to compare to that East German society. - "but still demanded to see my Austrian’s friend’s tax bill, and past examples of our correspondence."

croes 2y ago
Especially they shouldn't treat their customers like children. Warn him of the possible fraud, let him sign some form of agreement but then send the money.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  The point is that they have no idea who they are warning of fraud.
  - wruza 2y ago
    I don’t think that’s the point, unless their protocols allow to disclose information to and request proofs from a presumably omnipotent ai scammer.
- tsukikage 2y ago
  > Warn him of the possible fraud, let him sign some form of agreement Unfortunately, banks that used to take this approach have been stung by people who listened to the warning, signed the agreement, got defrauded, sued the bank /and won/.
  - croes 2y ago
    Blocking a customer to access his money is also a reason to sue and as a bigger negative effect on other customers. I think most people would be surprised you can win a case if you have been warned. But if you block my money that's a lot bigger issue.
- miohtama 2y ago
  The new UK law does not allow this, the new passed law is explicit that banks are forced to reimburse. Revolut customers are forced to take selfies "this is a scam" and they still send the money, and ask it back: https://x.com/moo9000/status/1790275729634029798 https://x.com/moo9000/status/1790275729634029798 As discussed in length in here (now downvoted): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41273554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41273554
viraptor 2y ago
> For him to call that suggestion "bizarre" indicates how badly out-of-touch and vulnerable he is to standard 2020's fraud techniques. I think we're missing a lot of context to say that here. It really depends on whether it was a quick one-off contact about just this issue, or their weekly one hour call. He may be well aware of the tech and know why it doesn't apply in this case.
pbhjpbhj 2y ago
I felt like the [mock?] indignation that it might be possible to clone a persons voice - at telephone compression levels - showed that the person did not have sufficient grasp of the situation to know if they were being scammed. The article says "Having had several telephone calls to establish it was actually her asking for help" and then later that it was "Zoom" sugguesting that it was Zoom audio-only calls. What would be the harm in having the Austrian government confirm the debt here, supposedly the friend, the customer, and the bank all know about it already. Or indeed what would be the harm in sharing the communications -- why would you not want to. Being set against it would suggest something like the messages saying "don't share these messages" which would be a massive fraud flag. We don't learn if the "Edinburgh academic" was ripped off or not. Aside, anyone have an insight into how do you suddenly get a "tax bill" from the Austrian government for 15k Euro?
- vidarh 2y ago
  > Aside, anyone have an insight into how do you suddenly get a "tax bill" from the Austrian government for 15k Euro? Extra income from contracts and failed to set aside enough? I've had big tax bills before, it's not that unusual, and I'd get the temptation of dipping into money set aside if subsequent income has been lower than expected. But tax authorities do tend to be flexible about repayment plans most places. Maybe that's not true for Austria. The bigger issue there for me, though, is that a scammer is not going to hesitate to fake a tax bill. Why the bank think that would prove anything suggests to me they haven't thought this through very well either.
  - henearkr 2y ago
    No, nowadays many official documents come with a URL (often in the form of a QR code) linking to a digital copy of the document stored on a governmental server.
    - vidarh 2y ago
      I have literally never seen this. I don't doubt it can happen, but for that to work it'd rely on the fraud team to 1) know exactly what a letter from the Austrian tax office should look like to notice if there isn't a URL if those letters do have one, 2) if the scammers were to include one, it'd require them to be certain enough about the URL that pointing it to a suitable fake one would be insufficient. I'm not convinced the fraud team wouldn't be easily fooled, in other words. Not that I'd want to try; but for someone already breaking the law there's little reason not to.
vidarh 2y ago
The thing is, if this involved voice cloning, seeing past examples of their correspondence would do very little. Past correspondence would rule out only the scenario where he is actively lying to the bank about this being an old friend... It seems like even if their concern might have some legitimate basis to it, they don't think through the scenarios very well.

henearkr 2y ago

To be honest, it sounds like it could be the friend in Austria who fell into a scam, and is thus left with cash flow problems. Victims in these situations are pushed to beg money from their family and friends.

wruza 2y ago

Sounded okayish until the part where they froze his account after he decided to close it out of frustration. Imagine saying you don’t want to deal with them only to find a pacifier in your mouth. Kafkaesque indeed.

feintruled 2y ago
I read that as him trying to move his money to another bank that would allow him to make the transfer. His current bank suspected this and wouldn't let him even close his account. So they confiscated his money to prevent someone else supposedly stealing his money - pretty Kafkaesque I think

mjburgess 2y ago

The bank should offer some sort of e-learning training which a customer can click through that shows all the relevant sorts of scams and why their money is being held up. If the customer confirms that they believe they are not a victim of any of these scams (etc.); and they confirm their identity (etc.); then the money should go through. The bank cannot decide on your behalf what you do with your money.

pbhjpbhj 2y ago
The customer should confirm "I know this is a scam, release my money anyway, I take full responsibility". It's necessary to release the bank from any liability in this sort of situation. From the article it sounds like a scam.
- Deathmax 2y ago
  As I understand it, UK banks (where this article is written) will soon be required[1] to reimburse victims of Authorised Push Payment fraud (some banks are signed up for a voluntary code at the moment) outside of "gross negligence" by the customer, so they can't just allow customers to waive liability. Making transfers now involves multi step questionnaires with big scary warnings about scams at every stage. [1]: https://www.psr.org.uk/publications/policy-statements/ps233-fighting-authorised-push-payment-fraud-a-new-reimbursement-requirement/ https://www.psr.org.uk/publications/policy-statements/ps233-...
  - TacticalCoder 2y ago
    > Making transfers now involves multi step questionnaires with big scary warnings about scams at every stage. I keep screenshots of banking websites warning about scams and phishing attempts as well as screenshots of articles in online newspapers about phishing attacks being on the rise. It's pure insanity.
    - chrisjj 2y ago
      > I keep screenshots of banking websites Then don't succumb to the banks pressure to switch to their mobile apps - which block screenshotting.

immibis 2y ago

I see no difference between what John actually said, and what John would say if he was a victim of a scam. Scammers do convince their victims that they are friends, in far away places. Sometimes they spend months building up this false friendship before asking for money. A giveaway is that you've never actually met the person. A simple "I've known him since childhood" or "I've met him in real life" would have cleared that up.

vidarh 2y ago
They, however, do not keep this up for 20 years: > MacInnes’s “crime” was to try to send money to a friend he and his wife have known for more than 20 years
- immibis 2y ago
  Did the bank know that?
  - vidarh 2y ago
    Did they not know that? You're moving the goalposts. You said you saw no difference between what he said and what victim of a scammer would. You've inferred from the article what you imagine he said. The article has the 20 years bit, and yes, we have no evidence he told the bank, but neither do we have evidence he didn't, and your only basis for assuming one and not the other is your own biases. It's fair to question whether he gave them that info, but not for just assuming he didn't.

miohtama 2y ago

[flagged]

kchr 2y ago
> The consequence is that the cost of stupid, scammed, customers is passed to all customers, including those that do not send money to scammers. What you conveniently left out in that cost calculation are the thousands of elderly and mentally ill people falling victims of such scammers. And who are these "stupid" people you mention anyway? Everybody knows social engineering is getting harder and harder to identify, considering how technology advances (spoofing SMS/caller ID, deepfakes, AI etc)
- miohtama 2y ago
  The fraud can be tackle other ways than making banks to pay for the fraud. There are tons of ways like extra confirmations of the payment, thresholds on daily payments, payment delays or just having a setting in your bank account that you are allowed to make "high risk" payments. But if you want to make the society to pay for vulnerable people, victims and friendly fraud, if we want to protect the eldery and others, these people can take an insurance against scams if they feel they are a vulnerable group. This is not a health issue, this is not a physical threat. This is not an epidemic. There is a cost of giving free insurance to these people, and a lot of them won't be eldery but the abusers fo the system. This was discussed in the article of Financial Times, and based on the news link, there is also a massive indirect cost for people by creating the unbalanced system of fraud reimbursement. 1 out of 8 UK people commit fraud, so banks can now prepare feel the cost of this new form of friendly fraud: https://www.cifas.org.uk/newsroom/fraudbehaviours23 https://www.cifas.org.uk/newsroom/fraudbehaviours23
  - kchr 2y ago
    Yeah, I realise now that I read your reply my message was just questioning the broad blame on so called "stupid people", without discussing the responsibility part of it. I absolutely agree the banks should implement more preventive measures to combat fraud where possible. In many cases, fraud is obvious from the bank's perspective but might not be from the victim's, for many reasons.

navaed01 2y ago

If you’ve ever been unjustly completely locked out of your finances for an extended period, it’s a bizarre experience and a wake up call. I once had a purely online bank ask me to prove my identity by mailing a copy of my passport. The only issue was they were asking me to prove I was someone else (they sent an email to me, but referencing someone else’s name in the email). They then locked me out because I didn’t respond fast enough and took that as suspicious activity. When I tried to explain I couldn’t prove I was someone I was not, they tried to skirt the fact they had messed up. Point being - banks need to protect our money, but banks make lots of silly mistakes that can ultimately harm the people they are trying to protect

Foobar8568 2y ago
Someone opened a bank account using my email. Bank rejected the fault on google who created a duplicate account and I was somehow accessing the other person email. Yeah sure buddy, they stopped their bullshit when I claimed I was going to contact the local authority.
- netsharc 2y ago
  Reminds me of getting someone's phone bills in my email (say it's foobar@gmail.com) because they thought their e-mail is foo.bar@gmail.com (GMail ignores dots in email addresss). I emailed the phone company telling them I'm not that guy, and they replied saying "Well as you can see we sent the mail to foo.bar@gmail.com, and that's not you".. OK genius, how did it arrive in my inbox, then? After 3 more of these I just set up a rule to immediately trash emails from them.
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derf_ 2y ago
This is a great reason to not put all of your financial eggs in one basket. You hear stories around here all of the time about people's businesses being ruined by Google's automated abuse systems and lack of customer support. There might only be one Google, but there are a lot of banks. They might all have similar policies, but at least it is less likely they will all try to screw you over at the same time. If you have rainy-day savings for at least six months of expenses (as everyone is advised to do), there is no reason you cannot split those up.

pbhjpbhj 2y ago

The only way to solve this that I can see is if the bank could confirm: 1) that the account being payed into belongs to the friend (so they can ask the name from the customer, and say 'that is [not] the name on the account') 2) confirm the tax liability (eg the Austrian gov provided a limited time hash-based URL where the bank could check a limited amount of the friends records; somewhat like sharing driving license details with car rental companies) To me, this would not be intrusive, assuming that there was a ledger (blockchain) in which the accesses were recorded and the bank was under a massive penalty (compensation to customer and penalty charge paid to the state) for any unnecessary accesses.

JadeNB 2y ago
> 2) confirm the tax liability (eg the Austrian gov provided a limited time hash-based URL where the bank could check a limited amount of the friends records; somewhat like sharing driving license details with car rental companies) Why should this be required? If I want to send money to my friend because I like them and want to give them money, then the bank should have no role beyond verifying that I am sending it to the person I intended. I shouldn't only be able to send money to address an immediately provable tax liability.
- pbhjpbhj 2y ago
  Yes, fair enough if you're sure it's your friend and that they're not being ripped off.

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daviddoran 2y ago

A family member works in banking phone support and the scams people get caught by are unbelievable. Every week people are convinced by scammers to give their bank cards to a taxi that arrives at their house (supposedly sent by the bank), they transfer 1,000s of euro to foreign bank accounts (supposedly at the request of the bank to safeguard the funds), they lie to the bank (somehow convinced by the scammers), etc.

Nextgrid 2y ago
That's a symptom of law enforcement having dropped the ball for over a decade. There is no way in hell anyone would dare send a taxi "sent by the bank" to pick up scam proceeds in a society with a functioning law enforcement system because the scam victim would be a honeypot most of the time and whoever shows up would be arrested & jailed (and likely rat out the rest of his crew).
- LeafItAlone 2y ago
  > because the scam victim would be a honeypot most of the time The pool of potential victims is the entire population with a bank account, meaning at least the majority of adults. The percentage that would fall of it and agree is certainly not 100%, but it is definitely higher than I personally expected years ago. That still results in a ton of possible victims. Give such a large pool, how can a police honeypot be the scam victim “most of the time”?
  - Nextgrid 2y ago
    Scammers need to reach the victim somehow. How they do this currently is either robocalls (call every single potential number in a loop), social media or advertising. If every disconnected number leads to a police-run honeypot that would play along (easy with the carriers' cooperation), police running bait social media accounts to get scammers to approach them, and proactively crawling scam-prone keywords for any scam ads to follow up on, the scammers will likely all get arrested before they'd even reach a single real victim. Most importantly, the mere fact this is happening would have a deterrent effect and effectively put a stop to such scam operations because even ignoring the risk of arrest, it's simply not profitable if the majority of your scam attempts go to law enforcement who simply wastes your time.

s1mon 2y ago

Try buying property for the first time. After having successfully wire transferred the 3% deposit to the escrow company, we tried to transfer the remaining amount of the down payment, and the bank just refused. They wouldn’t tell us in detail why but it seemed that a third party analysis service had flagged it as risky. We had to first wire transfer to another bank account with our lender (a different bank from where we had our cash to close), and that bank finally allowed the transfer to the escrow company. It felt really scary when we first were denied the ability to transfer our own money. Each wire transfer takes days, not minutes, and there were moments where it seemed like the money didn’t exist at the sending or receiving bank, so it made closing in 21 days a lot harder and more stressful than we expected.

ashkankiani 2y ago
I only realized after leaving the US how insanely slow transfers are there. In Hong Kong, transfers are basically instant. In Japan they often finish within 10 minutes. HSBC HK's daily transfer limit (not FPS) for me is about 3m HKD ~ 385k USD. I've transferred 30k within seconds to IBKR before.
- matwood 2y ago
  I've also had US bank wires be nearly instant. It all depends on how much and if it triggers additional fraud checks.
- TacticalCoder 2y ago
  > I've transferred 30k within seconds to IBKR before. 30 K EUR using instant SEPA tx? Transferring EUR to IBKR takes about one to two days for me so YMMV. As for the daily limit, it really depends on the bank and how much you have there: at one bank of mine I can tx up to 125 K EUR from the banking's website myself. At another bank I'm stuck at 5 K EUR max (!) and the option to raise that limit to 25 K EUR ain't working for me.
  - vidarh 2y ago
    Some of those limits are insidious because they risk causing people to trigger fraud checks for structuring/smurfing (doing multiple transfers below the reporting limits to avoid them), so by setting low limits they risk causing innocent users to inadvertently engage in behaviours that'll cause problems.

heraldgeezer 2y ago

Swedish TV recently sent an investigative episode on these phone bank scams. "Swedish" people in Spain send out mass SMS to people with a fake purchase order and phone number. Call the number you get to the scammers that say "Looks like your account got hacked if you did not order this, we will transfer you to your bank" The "transfer" is to another scammer who gets the person to transfer money from their account (who they think is hacked) to a "safe account" (the scammers account) So the scams are getting more and more sophisticated. So I DO understand the bank thinking this is a scam. That is a large sum of money. Usually requires an invoice. See is here (swedish only) https://www.svtplay.se/video/KVk3QWv/uppdrag-granskning/bedragarna https://www.svtplay.se/video/KVk3QWv/uppdrag-granskning/bedr...

Nextgrid 2y ago

The root cause of the issue here is that enforcement against scams no longer exists, so banks have no choice but to take matters into their own hands to try and prevent their customers from falling victim to one. In a functioning society scams wouldn't be as prevalent because law enforcement would take prompt and proactive action (which also acts as a deterrent and reduces the number of scams further) and thus banks wouldn't need to do this because getting scammed would be such a rare occurrence.

miohtama 2y ago
This is the UK. The root cause is that the new UK law forces banks to reimburse any transaction. More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41273554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41273554 Of course banks would not want to go kafka, but members of parliaments decided so and regulators forces banks in the turn. So point the finger at the regulators.
Ferret7446 2y ago
It's not just scams. There could be many reasons why a bank would freeze "your" money. There have been many cases, some recent, and some recently in developed/first world countries without due process, of governments telling banks to freeze someone's money because you did something the government didn't like. If you give your money away, then it's not really your money. If the other person doesn't given it back, are you going to force them to? Are you going to tell the regional controller of force to them them to do so? What if it's that entity that doesn't like you?
- JetSpiegel 2y ago
  > you did something the government didn't like Like storming the US Capitol, or blocking Canadian roads, these kinds of "political views"?

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TacticalCoder 2y ago

Speaking of which, here's the article about banks in the UK now being forced to reimburse scam victims: https://archive.is/iNupf https://archive.is/iNupf Anyone knows what the situation is in the EU regarding this? Do banks in the EU (or the Eurozone) have to reimburse scam victims too?