scammed out of £525.000

Welbeck
He can call me whatever he wants.
I don’t have a landline and I only answer numbers I know on my mobile. I check my bank account every day, sometimes twice.
I think the part of my character that protects me the best is: I don’t trust most people

As for someone telling me that I couldn’t go into my bank or access my online bank ( as they were) for 10 months defies belief that 2 intelligent adults would fall for.

Although ‘victim’ blaming is criticised, and in some cases quite rightly so, women who hand over their entire life savings to a man they have only ever conversed with online, can expect to face ridicule and disbelief.
Unless someone is two cans short of a six pack, they have only themselves to blame.

I do not think anyone has said they would never be caught by a scam. But most people who are scammed fall for well known scams that people are constantly warned about, and there is little excuse for that.

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00174dd

this is the piece about the courier fraud.
you may have to register with bbc to listen, but it's free.

Any of us might be caught by a sophisticated new scam. Assuming you are in possession of your wits, and of course some poor souls aren’t, there is no excuse for being caught by one that has been around for years and has received vast amounts of publicity.

at the end of that piece on You & Yours today, i noted that the police officer for financial security in N Yorks, said that it is extreme arrogance to think you would never be caught by a scam.
he said he might be, his colleagues might be, and he is investigating similar crimes at the moment.
victim blaming is not helpful. if you think it is, explain how.

Like you Maw I listened to that piece with my jaw on the floor. The most telling comment came at the end where the wife said she was telling her story to warn other people.
This case was in 2021!!!!!!
Where had the 2 of them been that they were totally unaware of this scam.

I used to work in the tax office, in my former life.
The best thing about that job was the tea trolley.

I had experience of the tax man knocking on my door. He was trying to find the previous owner. I found it very exciting. Unfortunately I didn’t have a forwarding address.

Good.
More fools and their money to be soon parted..

True Monica. I read the other day that only a fraction of trustees have registered their trusts too. The tax man will be knocking on some doors.

Remove last sentence of previous post, that refers to people who give their house to their children.

It was recently announced that the HMRC were actively taking on these 'trusts' that people put their money in to avoid care home fees. For these to work you need to convince HMRC that the purpose of the trust was NOT to avoid paying care home fees and that is not easy. LAs are also looking at whether they can declare them null and void, especially when the parents are still living in the house and not paying a market rent.

If this is the same case I was hearing about on todays “You and Yours,” I was gobsmacked that anybody could be quite so gullible and only became suspicious when the criminal tried to get her to sell her house.
It does not detract from the severity of the crime, but how naive were the couple in question. It beggars belief.
Best advice I heard was “Run any suggestions of this type past your adult children, or a good friend or family member - and phone the police “.
I am not dismissing negligence on the part of the banks and this is why the £674k is being refunded, but as responsible adults we need to engage our brains before opening wallet/credit card accounts/bank accounts.

A fool and his/her money are soon parted.

I felt less sympathy for the adult children who couldn’t get their hands on their inheritance property because of the problems with the trustees.
The trusts had been set up in an attempt by the parents to avoid having to pay care home costs.
So that means that the rest of us have to pay the parents’ care home costs through increased taxes and council tax, while the parents get free care homes and the children inherit a property.
So I felt the greedy people got what they deserved.

With the women the got scammed out of half a million, the bank had gone to extreme lengths to warn her, the bank had spoken to her in person and on the phone, the bank had written sent her warning letters, and the bank had arranged for the police to speak to the woman…..not once, but twice!
The woman believed the scammers when they told her bank employees in every branch were part of a secret group colluding to pinch her cash from her bank account, but surely she couldn’t have believed the police were also in on it, and could have divulged what the scammers had told her to the police.
I did feel sorry for her, but it would be totally wrong for the banks to compensate her for the half a million she lost, after all the attempts the bank made to dissuade and warn her. She would have been having her cake and eating it to be given another hall a million compensation after losing the first lot despite all the bank’s efforts to warn her. And it would be people perhaps without large savings who would ultimately pay her the compensation, as the bank would get the money back from its other customers.

NannaSpecialK I totally disagree. If you go on holiday and leave the front door wide open and a whole lot of expensive computer equipment on view, then you must expect not to find it there when you return. Yes, the thief should know better, but you have a responsibility to take care of your belongings and i doubt that your insurance company would make a full payment out.

It is the same with scams. Most of the ones people fall for ones that have been around for years and there are warnings about them everywhere you look, including on Gransnet.

Under all those circimstances the scammer/ thief is a criminal, but you are not necessarily a victim. Often the persson scammed/stolen from has by their actions made themselves a willing sacrifice.

In the case of scams that have been widely publicised, I don’t agree ^NannaSpecialK*. If we have mental capacity it is up to each of us to be aware and be responsible for our safety. Some of the scams people are still falling for have been known of and featured in newspapers and on television and radio for years. How any person in possession of their marbles can fall for them and then expect their bank to refund them beggars belief.

‘Unreasonable Gullableness’? I think it is very cruel to blame the victim of any crime. The victims have done nothing wrong whatsoever. Scammers are very clever at doing what they do. The fault lies entirely with the perpetrator. Most people are taken in by a good Magician. We don’t accuse them of having no common sense, we praise the Magician. Same thing surely? In both cases we have been deceived!

When an unknown number rings, I pick up the phone and say nothing for about 5 seconds. If it is a scam, you will here a slight click as the automatic dialling system in the scammers office records 'no response' and moves on to dialling the next number.

If the call is genuine, the caller will usually speak, or after about 5 seconds, if i do not hear the click, I will speak.

I do this because we have an answerphone will cut in and the callsystem records our number as being active and worth ringing again

Mallin
Could you explain how the scamming offices in Nigeria and Russia ( mainly) got their hands on these telephone books?

There seems to be more and more scams these days. I am totally sick of all the fake phone calls and emails and just hang up now if there is a gap between picking up the phone and a response. It has got so I just snap at people and sometimes they are friends who are slow to respond . They all understand exactly.

They don’t resort to phone books Mallin. If they know your name and number it’s because they’ve harvested details that you’ve entered when shopping online. If they don’t know your name they are simply dialling random numbers. We have been ex-directory for many years but scammers call and address me as Mrs GSM. We only use a landline here as we don’t have mobile reception. BT Call Protect, which enables you to block the last number to call you, has really cut down on the number of scam calls we get.

I never use it except to find where I left my mobile, so anyone phoning me on my landline is a scammer. I moved 6 years ago but took my number with me as I only moved a few streets away. So the scammers must have got the landline number from an elderly BT phone book as I haven’t been in it for some years. Most of the time it depends on how I’m feeling, so I can be nice or nasty to scammers. But the Very Worse was when I told the scammer I was sorry but Mummy died 2 days ago. A few days later I got a phone call saying that they were trying to find a xxxxxx. Xxxxxx ( my name ) as her mother still hadn’t repaid the £800 she’d borrowed and they just couldn’t ever get to speak to her. Knowing it was a scam I was in a bad mood so just told them Scammers get short shrift as I was 95 and my mother had died over 20 yrs ago. A lie but it just goes to show you should Never give info ( even untrue info ) to strangers who phone you I also said that if they called round to my address they might be in luck if my sister Susan was in as she was more gullible than me…………… I don’t know the people who moved into my old place but don’t like to ask them if they had someone asking for my sister Susan( who is a figment of my imagination!!!! )