scammed out of £525.000

Sometimes I wonder at the banks and their security criteria.

One day I made two payments to companies in the USA using a debit card. They were for hundreds of dollers each and went through without a problem.

Later that day I ordered $30 of goods from Tesco for a routine online shop and the bank inisted upon 2 layer authentification.

Blimey Claudia, how many cards have you got?

So have I.

Well, he is a busy boy..

www.gransnet.com/forums/scams_and_fraud/a1309893-Post-Office-Scam

Ooh ello.
I've had that one, too!

Oh dear, there was a thread about this just last week, Claudiaclaws

Simon is very busy, he tries to deliver all over the country.
He even tried to deliver a parcel to our postman who was out - delivering parcels!

I was scammed last week. I rceived a text saying "Simon tried to deliver a parcel please contact" there was a link, which I did follow. The link appeared to take me to the Royal mail site. It said that they had stopped leaving cards and to pay
£1.30 for redilivery which I did, using a credit card.
Then a little later thinking about a day later I decided,
a) it was odd that a Christian name was used.
b)The Royal Mail had stopped leaving cards
c)Also I couldn't remember which credit card I had used.
I then had to call all the cc card companies and check the balances any payments gone through. which involved cancelling the cards,and having new ones sent. Having done all this, I then received a call from someone purporting to be from one of the card companies saying that someone had tried to change my email address, asked a few questions, I very quickly realized this was one of the scammers. I said that I would ring him back. I rang the bank and got through to the fraud department, who said I had done the right thing.
These fraudsters want to harvest your credit card details and sell them on. So, that means that many months later you might see a large unexpected payment.
All the credit card companirs I spoke to had heard of this post office scam.
I hope my story helps you to avoid this scam

I absolutely agree MOnica and ShropshireMiss. Unless someone isn’t ‘the full shilling’ why should the bank refund them if they have fallen for a well publicised scam?

Watching this now. The bank did everything they could to warn her, speaking to her in branch and in person, writing warning letters to her, and even arranging for the police to speak to her not once but twice!
The programme says that she got £98,000 back. Fair enough if that was recovered from the scammers. However it would be very annoying if that £98,000 came from the bank itself rather than the scammers, because ultimately the bank’s other customers, ie us, would be paying for it.
I still can’t understand why she didn’t explain what she thought was happening to the police, when they spoke to, twice! Or why didn’t she phone the bank’s national phone number.
It sounds like she thought she was Miss Marple or Jessica Fletcher from Murder She Wrote.

I am not smug, I am well aware that I could be scammed, if a new, clever unknown scam started and I was caught before it was publicised. But many people who are scammed should have known better. They have no excuse for being so gullible. This doesn't stop me being deeply sorry for them when they suffer. But if I do something stupid I accept that it is my own fault.

Nearly all the scams people fall for are common well publicised ones. Some have been known and warned about for years, even a decade or so. They are well pubicised in newspapers, on line, on comsumer and other programmes on the radio or television.

It is up to each individual to take sensible precautions to protect themselves in life, whether it is making sure they have house insurance and locking their doors every time they leave the house or of being aware of all the common scams around.

Putting the phone down on cold calls, or checking independently on anyone who says they are ringing from your bank/the police etc., is basic common sense. If the phone call is genuine they will understand your concerns.

Obviously if people have cognitive problems or there is other reasons for them being particularly vulnerable to these scams, the situation is different. But, not many people have that excuse.

It’s unfortunate that the charities are charged for cheques, but they are still gaining money.

there is no reason for people to be smug and victim-blaming, but it still goes on, as seen here.

I've watched some of those love or money BBC programmes - awful and sad to see women and men being taken in by scammers. good programme. hopefully will be a warning not to send money to strangers - even if they are promising to marry you!! and check with family or banks if anyone asks for your money.

Coco51

It’s not as if there are no warnings an information. My sympathy is limited. What makes me so mad that if you are a victim of criminal fraud by family members who are executors of a will, the police don’t want to know. It is a position in which you are more vulnerable than victims of scams and the only redress you can get is having a spare £35k to personally do the job that the police are supposed to do to protect you.

It may be a civil matter over which the police have no jurisdiction - breach of trust. You may see it as fraud, but legally it may not be.

I don’t make cash donations to charities - I donate clothes, books, etc. which I no longer use instead. So it’s a win/win - I declutter my home, the charity makes money from the sales and everything is recycled. ?

grannybuy

I still use a cheque book to make charity donations, and post them. I don’t want to give credit card details in writing on the forms they send out, or online. The less people that have these details the better.

Charities now have to pay 40p for every cheque passing through their accounts, a charge on every transaction as well as a monthly charge for having an account with their bank.

It really is disgraceful for banks to make money from charities when they are making such huge profits, some higher than ever.
Barclays were one of the first to introduce these charges.
Annual pretax profit reached 8.4 billion pounds, the highest on record. Shares in Barclays rose as much as 3.8% in early trading. Chief Executive Officer C.S.23 Feb 2022

I'm surprised there hasn't been more of an outcry over this.

I've just had the nat west scam, telling me there was fraudulent transactions on my account, luckily my phone identifies possible scam or fraudulent phone numbers. I told them.their number was flagged as scam, and they told me to log into.my account to check the number when i said i would do so they hung up?
I rang the bank to check and it was indeed a scam, luckily they confirmed there were no fraudulent transactions on my account.

I too still use cheques to give to charities.
Scammers wouldn’t get much from me because I haven’t got much money anyway.

I still use a cheque book to make charity donations, and post them. I don’t want to give credit card details in writing on the forms they send out, or online. The less people that have these details the better.

I am with Lloyds and they ask for a passcode almost every time I order anything online so it's surprising they let 525k leave someones account without checking (who has that much money in their account!)

I checked my account online and noticed that I'd apparently spent £100 on a family ticket to a showground. I contacted the bank and it seems that my debit card had been cloned. I don't know where though. The local postmaster told me that a lot of locals had been caught in the same way as a 'comb' had been fitted to an ATM nearby. Needless to say I don't use ATMs any more.

Serendipity I have had two of those on WhatsAp. First I asked each a question my son would know the answer to...hahaha. I then called son. I also blocked and reported the numbers.

I transferred some money from a saving account to my current account and the cashier queried me very nicely about the transfer because it was in thousands. I told her we were having an extension built and it was a stage payment to the builder, who was well known to us as we had used him for over 20 years. I also told her I understood why she was making the enquiry and appreciated it.

We need to remember that there have always been people around trying to part you from your money. About 30 years ago an acquaintance, a mentally vulnerable man, living alone after his parents died, was cleared of his savings by builders knocking on the door and saying his house needed repairs, who then kept coming back until he was penniless - and of course little or no work was done.

The vast majority of scams are simple and well-known and there is no reason why anyone with their wits about them should fall for them.

As long as there have been computer or telephone scams, we seem to have been phoned/emailed to see if we would respond. it started with salesmen ringing up trying to sell dud shares and recently it was a company selling - well I am not sure, something to do with insulation, hinting that it was some kind of government backed scheme. I checked the company out after the call, just in case I was over suspicious and as expected it was a known scam and I posted info about that on GN.

Dh had no end of ‘pester’ calls after he made a charity donation via his phone.

For this reason I won’t donate by phone - I’ll donate via the website instead, and if they ask for a phone number they will be disappointed.

If any online shopping sites insist on a phone number, I just make one up. Why they insist I don’t know - you invariably have to give an email address for confirmation - why won’t that do, if they need to contact me?

The one time I did give a phone number, years ago now, was after I’d ordered something for next day delivery. And guess what - I waited in all day, it didn’t arrive, and they didn’t phone to tell me why.
Next day - ‘Oh, sorry, it was unexpectedly out of stock.’
‘So why didn’t you phone me then, having insisted on a phone number?’
They couldn’t answer.
Still, I wrote a stiff letter of complaint and received a £30 voucher, worth rather more then. So it wasn’t quite all bad.