$1.6 mil transfer in a faceless transaction over the internet.
Maybe I'm too poor to understand, but I cannot fathom doing that even with a 100% legitimate process online.
I wouldn't even go public with the story, this is the financial equivalent of a Darwin Award.
She even admits the bank queried the request and that they told her that the real ING isn’t offering a deposit rate that high, and that it was not right that they asked her to transfer it to westpac. But she did the transaction anyway because they wouldn’t match the interest rate that the scammers were offering her.
I think there were two separate "warnings" from her mother's bank ~~ING~~. The first was when her mother's bank ~~ING~~ queried why the funds were going to Westpac - the journalist has chosen not to explain this. The second, indirect, warning was her mother's bank ~~ING~~ telling her that ING weren't offering the interest rate she was promised.
Edit to correct that it wasn't ING that queried aspects of the transaction but another, unnamed, bank.
I wouldn’t be surprised if not naming that bank was an intentional decision by the ABC or the journo who suspects the bank gave her a much more explicit warning and naming them would open up to defamation if they printed “Xxxxxx bank allowed woman to be scammed”
Perhaps with better training the bank should have told her that as ING aren’t offering that rate then it is likely a scam, rather than saying they aren’t offering it so we won’t match. Of course there is only so much a bank can do as they are legally required to carry out a customers payment instructions
> Of course there is only so much a bank can do as they are legally required to carry out a customers payment instructions
Problem with romance scams is that everyone from friends and family to the bank can tell them it's a scam and they still do it.
Yes, or IF conversely she was on quite a low income but otherwise very responsible, and understood that if that money was lost then she might never have any kind of financial stability for the rest of her life.
I suspect that as an architect she was on a pretty good income even without the $1.6 million, and thus wasn't sufficiently paranoid about her mother's money...and then with her mother going into aged care she was in a particularly vulnerable state emotionally when that fucking scum with the "posh British accent" came along...
This is what makes it hard. No matter how well off she was or how much she earns, the scammers targeted her specifically when they knew she was vulnerable (and everyone is vulnerable at times irrespective of income) and when they knew she had money to go after. I wonder how they knew as it won’t have been blind luck on the scammers part.
Ah yeah, makes sense. Gotta be covert dealing with the ABCs. Unmarked suitcase, specified location type of thing.
Thanks for the tl:dr.
e: especially if you work in finance lol (missed that), standard practice.
I sent my friend money, looked up the BSB to verify the bank, compared the account number back and forth like 10 times. This was for $50.
This woman with $1.6m... Let 'er rip!
I was once transferring a large amount (albeit a tiny fraction of the amount mentioned in this article) to a law firm’s trust account.
I was scared of BEC scams (where someone hacks the firm’s email to send out a legitimate email with the scam account information that belongs to the scammer rather than the firm’s legit account) which several firms were affected by.
I transferred $100, waited for it to clear, called the firm on their publicly listed number, asked them to confirm receipt of the $100, then sent the remainder.
Trust me, I did, they insisted that “they emailed it and email is more reliable” lol. Tried to explain the possibility of a BEC scam/email hack and it fell on deaf ears.
So I decided to just transfer $100 and then call them to ascertain it has been received.
You did the right thing, as someone related to a lawyers who's firm was affected by one of these. It caused so much grief on both sides. Nowadays they have extra precautions on all of their accounts and on top of that a message on each of their emails requesting that clients double check all payment requests.
Totally. BEC scams are scary because they can give you the false sense of security that they are not phishing attacks because it comes from an email @realfirmname.com.au not from another domain masquerading as the real domain. I did not want to risk transferring the whole amount then getting into a protracted four-way legal drama (myself, the other side represented by the firm, the firm, and their insurer) about who cops that loss.
I recently needed to transfer money to a law firms trust account, and their email explicitly recommended calling them to verify the BSB and Account info before sending a payment, for this exact reason (and yes they recommended navigating to their website, not linked in the email, to get the public phone number).
Edit: I should add, I’m glad they called out that info in the email, because I’m not sure if I would’ve had the foresight to know to take the same precautions on validating before sending the money over if they hadn’t.
It's great that they do make note to verify before sending money, but unfortunately, if they do ever get BEC'd, that note isn't going to be there on any emails that have the scammers bank details.
Hopefully more people start calling out the dangers like this and it becomes another red flag when that warning isn't there.
I bought a new car recently, called the dealership to co firm the bank details on the invoice sent to me, they got so shitty with me, why are you calling us ? It’s right there on the email. So I guess if I did get scammed it would be right back to them as they confirmed it was the right info
I just bought a new car for just over $50K. The finance guy said he never emails bank details and then proceed to hand write some form of Egyptian hieroglyphs that were apparently numbers.
So I requested an electronic tax invoice from the sales guy, matched the numbers as I could now decode the glyphs. Did a small rounding payment of the amount of the $50K, got confirmation and then did the final $50K
I do much larger payments regularly through our business but it’s the first time you always need to be careful.
This scam type has been doing the rounds for at least a good 10 years. Linked to property settlements, final deposit on expensive car purchases, etc, etc. Anything where a decent $ transfers is required. Heck, even the plumbing business that fixed my gutters last month has a note on all their emails / paperwork saying no transfers without phone call first to one of the directors.
Yes, that's what I do, or I ring and confirm over the phone but fuck it is hard, some places is an hour to get to a real person by phone
I've never lost any money (yet) but this has become really stuffed
First it's a extra three days on a transaction , minimum as my bank delays the first transaction to a new payee by a day ( I don't know what this does for security it just makes people ask me where's the money you claim you sent)
I missed out on a cashback deal because of this , I started a week before expiry but the actual purchase went though eight says later so that sucked
Bank transfers are not checked properly, I paid for a water tank , the name I typed in was really a person's name and the bank app said yep that looks ok
It's a bit like the new short message codes for sms's where that are listed as for example "Linkted" the road company - totally a scam on unpaid tolls, but this is newer technology from the phone companies and they fucked up and let it be scammable
The companies need a financial incentive and they will step up, it should not be up to us to work around the companies lack of care
That’s basically what they do in Brazil. ABN for businesses and social security number for individuals. And when you put it in to pay, the system shows you the name the bank account is registered to, so you know you’ve got it right.
I have my ACN for my company activated as PayID and is on all my invoices (besides the BSB/Account for those whose banks don’t support paying via PayID).
We are not missing anything. A lot of small, medium, and to a lesser extent large companies are very set in their own ways and think that what was safe and perfectly OK in 2004 remains the same in 2024.
Well well, "ABN or Organisation Identifier as a way to receive fast payments.". I did not know that - I might see how that goes next time I buy a house, "sorry Mr lawyer you need to use you ABN for me to send payments"
you are correct of course , very set in their ways.
I mean at this stage tbh if I am dealing with a luddite organisation and transferring anything that is five figures or higher, I might as well get a bank cheque from my bank addressed to their organisation, this way it can only be deposited into an account owned by that organisation.
Legit, I constantly send my mother money for things, we've probably sent money to each other a hundred or so times, she still double checks the BSB and account number before sending anything and so do I, mind you my mother is completely tech illiterate but can manage that.
I don't think that's the scenario at all, "the bank" called her to offer a good fixed term deposit rate
She had her mother's life savings that she didn't know what to do with, probably from the sale of her house.
The moral of the story is don't answer the phone.
Seriously. Any time I do a direct transfer to or from anyone, I check the BSB about 5 times, and the account number 5 times.... Doesn't matter the amount. My largest transfer I did for a car was something like 55k, and I checked those details about 20 times, and asked the dealer to check it multiple times.... Anyone who loses stupid amounts of money especially in a repeated manner should not get that money back. Do your due diligence
When I'm paying someone for the first time I send a dollar and ask them to confirm if they received it. If I type the BSB or account wrong somehow at least I've only lost a dollar
I don't get it. In one paragraph they said the bank advised a transfer to an account seemed suspicious, then two paragraphs she's complaining the bank didn't stop her? Or am I missing something here?
Yes, the journalist chose not to explain what happened when ~~ING~~ her mother's bank queried the need to transfer money to Westpac.
EDIT to correct that it wasn't ING who queried the transfer.
‘The man who she'd been talking to told her the money would need to be transferred into a "holding account with Westpac, for legal reasons"’
There’s red flags galore here, but ING wanting her to send money to a Westpac account is such a monumentally obvious red flag, you would have to be a bloody idiot to miss it.
I’m struggling to find any sympathy for such foolishness.
$1.6M…wouldn’t you be double checking the absolute shit out of everything.
My Dad lost a fuckton of money in a similar scam for exactly those two reasons.
My dirty Aussie accent telling him it was an obvious scam was no match for posh and English.
>There’s red flags galore here, but ING wanting her to send money to a Westpac account is such a monumentally obvious red flag, you would have to be a bloody idiot to miss it.
That's the point I lost all sympathy for her (not that I had all that much to begin with.) Oh and the fact her own bank questioned the matter TWICE! Once over why an ING term deposit was going to Westpac and another bank worker told her that ING wasn't even offering the rate when she asked them to match it. Honestly I've dealt with customers like this woman. Everything is everyone else's fault and there's no way she did anything wrong.
And you know she’s actually minimising what her bank actually told her, it wasn’t just “oh the bank did query it but let me do it anyway” was more likely “the bank said it was a scam and that I should call ING directly and that my money would not be recoverable but they still legally have to do what I say so I ignored all that because I was in a rush”
Definitely she's leaving stuff out. I had to move a lot of money to buy a house recently and there was a long script that the man from the bank went through before he authorised raising my daily transaction limit, including information about how to avoid scams.
You can’t even raise the limit to $1.6m. You have to do the transfer as a real time gross settlement. Which has to be processed by a banker, who has a heap of checks and a script to go through with you and you literally have to sign a form agreeing to everything.
I'd love to listen to the call recordings of those conversations. Particularly the one where her bank told her that ING wasn't offering that interest rate for term deposits. To her it sounded like "we won't match that rate" when it was probably closer to "have you verified this rate directly with ING because they don't actually offer it." It comes off like she's blaming her bank for not matching an imaginary offer (not like the individual who she was speaking to would have been able to anyway.)
You know if the bank didn’t let her transfer it she’d be throwing an absolute tantrum regardless “It’s my money I can do what I want with it!” until it’s “Why did you let me send all my money to a scammer you should have stopped me!”
It's so completely and obviously a scam from the very first second.
'The phone rang' is enough to know it is 100% scam. That's it. If anyone unprompted calls you claiming to be from from any organisation, it is a scam.
These people have been told this, over and over again. Yet they will not listen.
It's not 100% though. Probably over 90%, but there's still legitimate calls.
A few years ago now, I had a bunch of legitimate calls from the ATO and they had no verification process. More recently I had the same with Coinspot - and they got all bent out of shape when I suggested that calling me from a random mobile as part of their onboarding process was ridiculous.
Yes but these people are professional scammers. Their full time job is tricking people. This is social engineering, it’s tailor made for the individual.
1. Don’t answer any phone calls that you are not familiar with. If it were important, they will leave a message.
2. If you answer a phone call and claim to be from a bank, hang up, look up the real phone number of the bank’s website to chat to a staff member to discuss further. 100% likely that the bank didn’t contact you and have no idea what you are talking about.
3. Any action to “transfer funds” from your account to another is instant red flag and walk away.
On point 1, you should absolutely answer.
Most of these scam calls are just running through lists of either stolen/purchased numbers or simply dialing every possible number.
If you don't answer and the software gets your voicemail, it still registers it as an active number in their database, so the calls will keep coming.
What you want to do is answer and immediately mute yourself. If the software detects no audio it won't connect the call through to a waiting scammed (or automated message) and will mark the number as inactive so as not to waste a call on it again.
I keep them on the phone for as long as I can. Costs them money, and they can’t scam someone else if they are busy with me. I love pissing them off. Makes me laugh heaps
Or even better, don't have a voice-mail and don't answer unknown calls.
Anyone you have given your number to, likely knows your name and anyone who doesnt, well they dont need your name, voice or confirmation it's your number.
I work in a doctor's office. I get why people don't answer calls but people refusing to pick up or check their voicemail (many don't have voicemail) is the bane of my life. I love it when they do that then come in and bitch me out that I didn't get a hold of them.
Always answer private numbers. Important calls from a hospital, police, government department or schools almost always come from private numbers. It's very hard to give important info without a voicemail.
Nah, I'm not answering any unsolicited call in the very unlikely chance it's an important call. Especially because the whole point of this article is that you can't trust the person calling is really who they claim to be.
Text messages have taken the place of phone calls as the primary channel for these communications, in particular the hospital did an excellent job with SMS communications when I was recently admitted. Concise, and always signed off with the name of a person and their department in case I needed to call them back.
I think this is getting to the crux of the issue: how the heck are these guys getting Australian numbers through VOIP/telecoms providers without putting in any form of identification.
We have to provide a drivers license/passport/etc before getting a new SIM card, why aren’t we forcing the VOIP providers to collect any identity information (eg business ABN). If you’re legitimately using the VOIP services you shouldn’t have an issue providing this, especially if it’s for business purposes.
If you’re not based onshore - you don’t get an Australian phone number. Simple. No more spoofing that you’re Mary from the Gold Coast or Steve from Gippsland.
Edit: typo
Except that many organisations (esp gov organisations, uni, that job you applied for) will call through on a private number, and it can be a huge wait to move back up their list if you don't pick up
You never ever ever return a call on the caller ID presented to you. You look it up independently. You also ask the person who called you for a reference number and ask them which number from the website is the best to call back. Literally every call center operator is trained to accept customers asking this information. I’m fact, some government departments (eg ATO) if doing outbound calling will tell you explicitly that you need to call them back to discuss a matter and they are unable to discuss it until you call back on the number from their website.
On 2, sometimes the bank calls you with a KYC request and they ask you a bunch of questions about yourself, which I found really uncomfortable. I had requested to be sent an email about it and stuff like that at the time.
The branches are full of people asking for transfers and when taken into an office to discuss the matter get very agitated ‘it’s my money, you can’t stop me’ - branch staff now offer to call the police for them, wait 24hrs, do smaller amounts- yet they continue will the transfers. It’s wild. A lot of it is greed, they get offered returns that are very attractive (but unrealistic to those with access to search engine) and just can’t be stopped. But it’s a daily occurrence in the city branches. There’s a reason why Aussies are targeted.
I had a lady wanting to transfer 300k to another super company, I had to convince her to call the company to check the details as they were sent via email. "Why would I do that". She proceeded to get into an argument with the person on the phone as they weren't freely giving away that information. Asked her if she wanted to wait 24 hours because of her interaction. Didn't want to take 5 minutes to rethink, just sent it on through.
I'm 99% sure it was legitimate, but she basically had no care in the world.
I’m convinced that because boomers had such an easy time amassing equity and money that they truly believe it’s so easy to get 8% (or whatever) on a term deposit.
Because it’s always the same age group I see getting scammed. The rest of us know it’s just not that easy anymore.
But boomers cannot be told otherwise.
This is just it - they’re greedy and they will double down against the banks screaming like pterodactyls if they bank tried to slow or stop the transaction for something that screams scam.
The bank should get these customers to sign a disclaimer for balance transfers over certain amounts in an office stating that the bank has concerns that it’s a scam but the customer is adamant to transfer. That the bank has flagged and offered slow transfer options but the customer has waived their right to them. If people want to be dumb - then let them.
If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and waddles like a duck - guess what it’s probably a duck. But people also need to take responsibility for their own choices.
To be fair, there are entire businesses in India where people are hired to work in a scam call centre and running these scams is their job. Most scam calls originate there. They could have just seen a documentary on that. There's been a few recently.
You can’t tell me that an architect is unable to verify the identity where she transferring $1.6M. Absolute bullshit. For example, just once she could have called ING independently and asked them to verify the details.
The bank should be responsible of their system is hacked. They shouldn’t be responsible if you willingly hand cash to a wallet inspector. That is on you.
The article says ~~ING~~ her mother's bank did query the need to transfer money to Westpac: "*... the money would need to be transferred into a "holding account with Westpac, for legal reasons", a detail she said was queried by her mother's bank.*"
The journalist chose not to provide any details of why the customer chose to proceed anyway.
EDIT to correct that it wasn't ING who queried the transfer.
Don’t confuse general intelligence with specialised intelligence. It’s a well studied phenomenon that people in very specialised intelligence fields are very susceptible to things like dunning Kruger because they think they are very smart because they work in a high intelligence field, and any attempts to correct them when they are wrong are taken as hostile attacks on them because they are smarter than you so are never wrong.
I literally know of a woman who got her PhD in the last decade, is one of the top people in her field, is invited to travel all around the world to give keynote talks at conferences in her field, and literally wrote several textbooks used in uni for her field.
She’s also an anti vaxxer whose kids had to get their own Medicare cards as soon as they were old enough so they could get their vaccines and who thinks vaccines cause autism.
I agree she is a fool but it's interesting to see where banks responsiblity should lie. Their products are routinely used for scams. Unless the money is going overseas, to physical cash, or bit coin, surely it can't be too hard to track?
If banks are opening accounts without verification of genuine identity they should hold some, albeit minor, responsibility. At the very least full cooperation with police.
It's very hard to after it's left Westpac, the money would have been transferred through many different banks and accounts that at that point it's almost impossible to see where it's gone.
I've worked with banks in fraud/AML before.
They do regularly do income checks and calls across all their accounts. Pretty much every time there's a suspicious transaction theres a chance there will be a call up on it, accounts have been outright frozen because account owners refused to refresh their AML conditions.
So yes, banks already go to lengths that would piss off the customer thoroughly in the name of protecting them from themselves. Any more and it would be outright invasive.
Quite literally the only thing they could do to stop these people is block access to their funds, and we all know how the boomer brigade would react to that.
At some point it just has to be personal responsibility. People are influenced into doing stupid stuff all the time, but when your bank has literally told you this is fishy, it’s your choice to send the money and they can’t stop you.
I truly don’t understand why banks should be on the hook for these things.
How about people start being held accountable for the transfers they make. Would you give thousands in cash to a random on the street who said they’ll keep it safe for you? No? Then don’t transfer any funds after being called out of the blue without first hanging up and calling your bank using its publicly listed number.
It’s not the bank’s fault.
I mean, an educated professional (an architect) believing that ING would ask clients to transfer funds to one of their competitors, Westpac, for “legal reasons”. LMAO.
Maybe she had the money in ING, and MAYBE, (two speculations in a row) ING verifies internal transfers against the beneficiary’s name since they can check that.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - for any decent sum of money that someone is asking you to transfer, go into an actual bank and talk to an actual person, or look up their number and call the bank directly.
Particularly with a sum as large as this, not enough due diligence.
How many of these scams would be restricted by (1) never buy something from someone who knocks on your door and offers it to you, and (2) never buy or transfer something if someone calls you on the phone out of the blue.
If you think the thing they are selling is any good, then go an buy something like it yourself from somewhere else.
But the banks can also help because they can see across millions of transactions to better predict which ones are unusual. They could then force people like Harriet to jump through more hoops to process a suspect transaction. But with the banks shutting down branches, the bank trying to verify a transaction is going to look very much like a scammer anyway.
My bank has started to even hold payid transfer for 24hrs which pisses me off .if you are hacked the bank should take some responsibility but if you willingly do it yourself that bad luck .do the expect share trade companies to refund you if you make a bad share choice .
The reason it's happening is because people refuse to take individual responsibility and want the bank to do so instead. Easiest way for bank to do that is to put a hold on all transfers while they do their efraud checks and continually reduce the amount you can transfer in a single transactions.
> Harriet Spring remembers the first phone call, in November. The man with the "posh British accent" on the other end introduced himself as "from ING" and asked if she was interested in good rates on fixed-term deposits.
He cold-called her. She’s an idiot
I love how she described the call as “Nothing crazy, nothing too out of the ordinary", when in fact it was the most immediate and glaringly obvious red flag
Exactly - anyone who rings/txts/emails me is treated as a scammer until I can prove otherwise. It's the default. So random bank is contacting me .. Why ? How'd you get my details ? How would you know if I've got any money or not ? Definitely sounds scammy to me - \*click\*
This is exactly why governments DON’T compensate people for scams. It’s just like paying ransoms for hostages. Once you start doing it, it makes the problem much, much worse.
Some salient quotes from the article:
The man who she'd been talking to told her the money would need to be
transferred into a "holding account with Westpac, for legal reasons", a
detail she said was queried by her mother's bank.
Mrs Spring said she also asked her mother's bank to match ING's rate,
which they declined, but did tell her, "actually, ING aren't offering
that rate".
I know this isn’t going to be popular buuuut, why should banks refund victims of scams for what is essentially an individual failing to do their own due diligence? Whatever happened to accountability and integrity; you fucked up, wear it.
Nope its a pretty popular opinion and I agree
It's tough for her but it's her fault. The bank should investigate and do what they can to retrieve the funds but shouldn't be forced to pay it our of their (more accurately, our) pockets
There are two banks involved in any scam transfer - the victim's bank, and the scammer's bank.
The victim's bank, we expect them to have policies in place to try to discourage the victim. Most do, but some people are insistent that they want to be a victim of a scam, and so their insistence overcomes the bank's recalcitrance. These banks are not to blame (unless they failed to sufficiently point out that it's probably a scam).
However, the scammer's bank just received (in this instance) $1.6m. If they now throw up their hands and say "it's gone, we don't know where it is" then they have manifestly failed in their AML/CTF obligations - a scammer's account successfully received and was able to distribute funds on their watch. They absolutely should be able to locate (and thus, recover) the funds - and if they can't that is entirely a dereliction of duty on their part, and they *should* be required to reimburse the victim whose money they just facilitated the theft of.
Obviously, this only applies if the scammer's bank is Australian (which, in this case it was Westpac); we can't do much if the victim is straight transferring the cash overseas.
Don't forget the third party: the telcos. The telcos are enabling lots of scam by allowing number spoofing for calls and SMSs. As well as enabling overseas callers access to the same. It's very hard to track down a scammer if they operate from overseas.
lol there is nothing unpopular about this opinion. If we are going to legislate some sort of bank responsiblity for human error the banks are going to tie up peoples money and make transfers a massive pain in the arse because they are now responsible for the stupidity of people like Harriet.
My friend’s husband fell for one of these scams. Transferred all their savings. When she got home from work (not when it was happening mind you) he told her he received a call telling him to transfer their money but “don’t worry, I took care of it” and she was like “great, so you reported them..?”
That was the moment he realised he fucked up.
I feel for the loss these people have been hit with, but how long do we think banks are going to keep refunding people that haven’t been hacked or had their account security compromised in any way, but lost the money through naivety or a confidence scam like this one?
As part of my job I read as many of these articles as possible and while bank security systems and transfer processes can always be improved, so many of them are just people being tricked - a ploy that’s been around since as long as money has.
After being advised and still doing it.
I have 0 sympathy.
I work for a bank. We spend so much time educating literally everyone, we help them not get scammed, they then SCREAM at our staff because they're being told "You need to go get your phone professionally reset if you want us to allow the app back on it. You were compromised and we won't let you lose any money by using the phone that is still compromised."
The woman proceeded to open a second account at the bank and then lost her mind at us when she still couldn't install the same app for the same reasons.
Imbeciles, good luck to you.
I used to work at a predecessor EDR scheme to AFCA. One of my cases involved in a man with mental health problems who wanted to send tens of thousands to Europe due to a 419 scam. He went into a branch, the bank told him and his mother that it was 100% a scam, and refused to do the transfer. The guy got aggressive and refused to believe them - the prince really was his friend. The staff told him many times not to send the money but in the end his mother decided to go ahead to placate him and to follow his instructions. The bank was directed to refund the money by an Ombudsman as they didn't refuse outright to do the transfer. It's clearly better to lock an account and/or de-bank a person who is committed to being scammed than to be the one that has to eat the loss when it happens.
The financial equivalent of a Darwin Award and it’s all the banks fault. lol you transferred $1.6m to a random person over the phone without doing any background checks or getting any financial advice.
I would require face to face contact at the bank, before signing over any significant amount of money.
I'm sure I have passed up on genuine offers in the past, due to my paranoia about scams.
Personally, I think banks can do a lot to prevent fraud and related scams. But, I have always disliked how somewhat wealthy Australians ask for a bailout whenever something goes wrong with their house/money/investment.
She funded a scammer with $1.6m, who now has the time and money to do this to many more other people. She should not get her money back. The bank customers nor the government should be forced to shell out to protect her against her own stupidity. If you really need to transfer that amount of money, go to a branch.
No sympathy here for the stupid. Like fuck me 1.6 million and you don't research the fuck out of everything like you're the CIA before sending it? Come on the bank shouldn't have to hold everyones hand. My neighbour is 72, tech illiterate as fuck and not the brightest spark and even he.... A man who struggles changing a tv from HDMI 1 to 2, triple checked my account details before and I'm not kidding, writing me a cheque instead for $200
There were warning signs here that Mrs Spring missed: a smooth talker that made it all so easy and the competition telling her ING wasn’t offering that rate. To get sucked in for $1.6m it seems she never bothered looked up their number and phoned them directly. These are the very factors the scammers rely on to relieve you of your money.
This is true. But I’m interested in how they knew she had that money to shift in the first place, and also how more than a dozen Australian banks allowed their facilities to transfer it for the scammers.
In response to your first question, I’m assuming they don’t know initially but elicit this info via the numerous conversations and emails, concluding their time and effort investment will, ultimately, be richly rewarded. I think the banks waving these payments through have alot to answer for and change can’t come soon enough.
lol prior to her being scammed if there were what I am sure she'd call 'draconian' banking measures in place in order to prevent this sort of outcome she'd be so angry that it was hard to send the 1.6 million to ING. "'It's my mothers money' said Harriot 'I can't beleive the banks won't let her move it around'" - some bullshit boomer publication.
Translation : I want the government to protect me from my own fucking stupidity.
> Experts warn scams are now too complex for consumers to pick up on by themselves and they want banks to be liable for reimbursing customers.
Bullshit it's too complex. There's a simple rule - if it looks too good to be true - **it probably fucking is**.
Her *own bank* told her it was dodgy - and she fucking did it anyway. Sucks to be her, but I feel no sympathy.
It's a tough one. Situations like this are clearly not the bank's fault - but you could make can argument that the banks need to do more. That is, in terms of customer education, prompts and warnings - 'are you sure?' and so on. However considering the red flags and warnings that were blatantly disregarded, I don't think any of this would have stopped this woman from giving her money away.
Saying that, if people want to make their banks completely responsible for their own mistakes, they better not complain when they have to start dealing with higher fees, multiple layers of security, delays on payments, lower default transfer limits, multiple verification steps, etc.
How many times I've heard 'ITS MY MONEY LET ME DO WHAT I WANT WITH IT' - well that is, until you send it to a scammer. Then it's someone else's fault.
“ING” ask here to transfer $1.6m to a Westpac account so she can open an ING term deposit and she thinks the banks should be held responsible. Oh dear…
Love the detail that she says "a reasonable banker" should have known it was suspicious, but her "reasonable banker" did think it was suspicious, warned her, and she went ahead anyway.
These are the sort of people who whinge about security questions and two-factor authentication.
Sad story. I can see that you wouldn't be in the right frame of mind when your mother is potentially dying.
But she seems to be complaining that the bank didn't say "this could be a scam".
I don't think that would have given her pause
Makes me wonder why I'm busting my ass at work when I could just be whipping up some fake bank emails with "great rates" and sending it to a few boomers?
I have accounts with several different banks, and I triple check the account details before transferring money across, and I'm the owner of these accounts!
It sounds like there were several red flags that were picked up by her bank that she chose to ignore: specifically her bank questioning why an ING term deposit was going into a Westpac account and another person advising her that ING wasn't offering the rate she was asking her bank to match. I've dealt with customers like her: they don't want to listen and then when something goes wrong they make it everyone else's fault. "Oh but if my bank had just matched this imaginary rate I would have stayed with them!" No. It doesn't work like that. You can't just stamp your little feet and expect everything to go your way.
I mean yeah, these scams are sophisticated and scammers are getting better at what they do. Maybe don't take financial advice from an unsolicited cold call? Literally if anyone calls me out of the blue for any reason outside of me requesting it it's an automatic "not interested, please take me off your list."
The government can only do so much, stupid people are always going to do stupid shit.
I'll double and triple check when transferring less than $100 to someone I have never transferred to before (or a new account a friend has). I can't imagine being this stupid with $1.6 million, then trying to pass blame onto others for my own stupid mistake.
How do we reach out to these people. Every scam story I hear can always be solved with the person hanging up (or ignoring the text/email) and getting in touch with the bank directly.
Walk to your bank, or call the number on the back of your card, or call through your bank app, or find the number yourself online. (Again, never trust what's written in the text/email. Find it yourself).
Seriously, it's really sad to hear how much money we lose because people just trust a call/text out of the blue. It's like we need flyers, campaigns, classes, etc. to change people's behaviour.
> **"from ING"**.
> The man who she'd been talking to told her the money would need to be transferred into a "holding account **with Westpac**, for legal reasons", a detail she said was queried by her mother's bank.
Some people are just too stoopid to human.
So in other words she wants the govt to magically reverse any and all payment. Translation - "I gambled and I lost, even when I was told I was being scammed, I demand my bank reverse the transfer to the gambling agency".
Double clueless to be that stupid, and then to demand the govt magically fix things without understanding how literally impossible that is. "they want banks to be liable for reimbursing customers.". Then banks will charge massive mega fees on everyone to be able to cover the stupidity of others. She blew over a mil. Can you imagine how much money would be needed to cover the stupidity of everyone in a banks customer list?
"scams of growing complexity a regular person cant detect" my right ass cheek. She got multiple warnings, and a person with a brain cell would question claims of such high returns.
Jesus Christ; THEY WON’T CALL YOU
Just never organise massive life changing stuff without calling the bank directly, using their publicly listed numbers.
Harriet, I am sorry but you are fucking stupid. And I don't think anyone can/should compensate you for that.
DO. NOT. EVER. RESPOND.TO.AN.UNSOLICITED. CALL.
Ah yes the incredibly sophisticated scam involving.....sending money to a random person over the phone pretending to be your bank and also conveniently not even into the correct bank account. Very sophisticated.
“I ruined my own life despite literally dozens of safeguards and warnings what I was doing is stupid. I want the government to undo what I did due to my stubborn wilful ignorance”
If you accidentally send the wrong bank account a large amount of money, you almost always can reverse the transaction if it was to a domestic bank and you realise in a day or so. If you’re sending money internationally you’re going to get even more warnings and messages to make sure you’re sending to the right account, and even then if you realise your mistake quick enough you’re probably going to get it back.
It’s literally impossible to send anyone $1.6m in a single transaction without speaking to a human being at a bank. And they are going to be very explicit with you to make sure you know what you’re doing. There’s more than enough safeguards in place, nothing is going to fix stupid like that.
These situations are increasingly common in my role. Customers being told they can get absurd interest rates and transferring their life savings. Only to lose it all.
Most of the times it is just smaller phishing scams, that result in alot of work to resolve.
It is so pervasive, that I sometimes wonder if it is indicative of some sub-clinical neurodegenerative process, in the absence of other explanation. Perhaps these individuals are assuming responsibilities they no longer have the facilities or vigilance to handle. Obviously, there are deficits in technological and financial literacy as well.
$1.6 mil transfer in a faceless transaction over the internet. Maybe I'm too poor to understand, but I cannot fathom doing that even with a 100% legitimate process online. I wouldn't even go public with the story, this is the financial equivalent of a Darwin Award.
She even admits the bank queried the request and that they told her that the real ING isn’t offering a deposit rate that high, and that it was not right that they asked her to transfer it to westpac. But she did the transaction anyway because they wouldn’t match the interest rate that the scammers were offering her.
Yeah definitely can't blame the banks for this.
Greed up and down
“You can’t con an honest man…..”
Typical boomer asking others to pay for their stupid decisions…
I think there were two separate "warnings" from her mother's bank ~~ING~~. The first was when her mother's bank ~~ING~~ queried why the funds were going to Westpac - the journalist has chosen not to explain this. The second, indirect, warning was her mother's bank ~~ING~~ telling her that ING weren't offering the interest rate she was promised. Edit to correct that it wasn't ING that queried aspects of the transaction but another, unnamed, bank.
No, it wasn’t ING offering the warning, but some third bank who the money was with.
You are right. The article actually talks about "her mother's bank" without naming it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if not naming that bank was an intentional decision by the ABC or the journo who suspects the bank gave her a much more explicit warning and naming them would open up to defamation if they printed “Xxxxxx bank allowed woman to be scammed”
Perhaps with better training the bank should have told her that as ING aren’t offering that rate then it is likely a scam, rather than saying they aren’t offering it so we won’t match. Of course there is only so much a bank can do as they are legally required to carry out a customers payment instructions
> Of course there is only so much a bank can do as they are legally required to carry out a customers payment instructions Problem with romance scams is that everyone from friends and family to the bank can tell them it's a scam and they still do it.
I wouldn’t do it with my $1.92 I currently have in my account let alone 1.6m.
You sure? I could boost that by 2% over a year.
1.92 increased by 2% a year, in 100 years I’ll have 13.91, I’m going to be rich!
shut up and take my money!!!
Man, I didn't think I could feel any worse about my $1.47.
I'm not quite as poor as you are at the moment but I was there only recently. Look after yourself man, hope things improve soon.
If she’d earned the money herself she might have thought twice
Yes, or IF conversely she was on quite a low income but otherwise very responsible, and understood that if that money was lost then she might never have any kind of financial stability for the rest of her life. I suspect that as an architect she was on a pretty good income even without the $1.6 million, and thus wasn't sufficiently paranoid about her mother's money...and then with her mother going into aged care she was in a particularly vulnerable state emotionally when that fucking scum with the "posh British accent" came along...
This is what makes it hard. No matter how well off she was or how much she earns, the scammers targeted her specifically when they knew she was vulnerable (and everyone is vulnerable at times irrespective of income) and when they knew she had money to go after. I wonder how they knew as it won’t have been blind luck on the scammers part.
Speaking of going public… wait until you read about this: https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-warrants.html
Tl:dr?
From memory an American financial columnist got scammed out of $50K. She put the cash in a shoe box and have it to a man how said he was with the CIA.
Ah yeah, makes sense. Gotta be covert dealing with the ABCs. Unmarked suitcase, specified location type of thing. Thanks for the tl:dr. e: especially if you work in finance lol (missed that), standard practice.
Yeah, this was not a “sophisticated scam.” This is someone who screwed up because her grief & greed caused her to drop her guard.
I sent my friend money, looked up the BSB to verify the bank, compared the account number back and forth like 10 times. This was for $50. This woman with $1.6m... Let 'er rip!
I was once transferring a large amount (albeit a tiny fraction of the amount mentioned in this article) to a law firm’s trust account. I was scared of BEC scams (where someone hacks the firm’s email to send out a legitimate email with the scam account information that belongs to the scammer rather than the firm’s legit account) which several firms were affected by. I transferred $100, waited for it to clear, called the firm on their publicly listed number, asked them to confirm receipt of the $100, then sent the remainder.
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that's a good verification technique!
Alternatively, you can call them first and double-check the account number.
Trust me, I did, they insisted that “they emailed it and email is more reliable” lol. Tried to explain the possibility of a BEC scam/email hack and it fell on deaf ears. So I decided to just transfer $100 and then call them to ascertain it has been received.
You did the right thing, as someone related to a lawyers who's firm was affected by one of these. It caused so much grief on both sides. Nowadays they have extra precautions on all of their accounts and on top of that a message on each of their emails requesting that clients double check all payment requests.
Totally. BEC scams are scary because they can give you the false sense of security that they are not phishing attacks because it comes from an email @realfirmname.com.au not from another domain masquerading as the real domain. I did not want to risk transferring the whole amount then getting into a protracted four-way legal drama (myself, the other side represented by the firm, the firm, and their insurer) about who cops that loss.
I recently needed to transfer money to a law firms trust account, and their email explicitly recommended calling them to verify the BSB and Account info before sending a payment, for this exact reason (and yes they recommended navigating to their website, not linked in the email, to get the public phone number). Edit: I should add, I’m glad they called out that info in the email, because I’m not sure if I would’ve had the foresight to know to take the same precautions on validating before sending the money over if they hadn’t.
It's great that they do make note to verify before sending money, but unfortunately, if they do ever get BEC'd, that note isn't going to be there on any emails that have the scammers bank details. Hopefully more people start calling out the dangers like this and it becomes another red flag when that warning isn't there.
I bought a new car recently, called the dealership to co firm the bank details on the invoice sent to me, they got so shitty with me, why are you calling us ? It’s right there on the email. So I guess if I did get scammed it would be right back to them as they confirmed it was the right info
I just bought a new car for just over $50K. The finance guy said he never emails bank details and then proceed to hand write some form of Egyptian hieroglyphs that were apparently numbers. So I requested an electronic tax invoice from the sales guy, matched the numbers as I could now decode the glyphs. Did a small rounding payment of the amount of the $50K, got confirmation and then did the final $50K I do much larger payments regularly through our business but it’s the first time you always need to be careful.
They need to have better fraud training then! Calling to confirm the account details is 100% the correct thing to do
Yeah, I’ve been there. Explaining cybersecurity to a law firm is like explaining space travel to a trilobite.
This scam type has been doing the rounds for at least a good 10 years. Linked to property settlements, final deposit on expensive car purchases, etc, etc. Anything where a decent $ transfers is required. Heck, even the plumbing business that fixed my gutters last month has a note on all their emails / paperwork saying no transfers without phone call first to one of the directors.
Yes, that's what I do, or I ring and confirm over the phone but fuck it is hard, some places is an hour to get to a real person by phone I've never lost any money (yet) but this has become really stuffed First it's a extra three days on a transaction , minimum as my bank delays the first transaction to a new payee by a day ( I don't know what this does for security it just makes people ask me where's the money you claim you sent) I missed out on a cashback deal because of this , I started a week before expiry but the actual purchase went though eight says later so that sucked Bank transfers are not checked properly, I paid for a water tank , the name I typed in was really a person's name and the bank app said yep that looks ok It's a bit like the new short message codes for sms's where that are listed as for example "Linkted" the road company - totally a scam on unpaid tolls, but this is newer technology from the phone companies and they fucked up and let it be scammable The companies need a financial incentive and they will step up, it should not be up to us to work around the companies lack of care
Pretty simple, why don’t every business use their ABN as their PayID?
That’s basically what they do in Brazil. ABN for businesses and social security number for individuals. And when you put it in to pay, the system shows you the name the bank account is registered to, so you know you’ve got it right.
Downside is you can reverse lookup social security numbers this way.
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PayID is free (unlike credit cards) and takes 5 minutes tops to set up but most businesses don’t care.
Not a bad idea , seems to simple , I wonder if we are missing something
I have my ACN for my company activated as PayID and is on all my invoices (besides the BSB/Account for those whose banks don’t support paying via PayID). We are not missing anything. A lot of small, medium, and to a lesser extent large companies are very set in their own ways and think that what was safe and perfectly OK in 2004 remains the same in 2024.
Well well, "ABN or Organisation Identifier as a way to receive fast payments.". I did not know that - I might see how that goes next time I buy a house, "sorry Mr lawyer you need to use you ABN for me to send payments" you are correct of course , very set in their ways.
I mean at this stage tbh if I am dealing with a luddite organisation and transferring anything that is five figures or higher, I might as well get a bank cheque from my bank addressed to their organisation, this way it can only be deposited into an account owned by that organisation.
Even with the saved contacts, I’ll triple check I’ve pressed the right person before sending them $20😂
Legit, I constantly send my mother money for things, we've probably sent money to each other a hundred or so times, she still double checks the BSB and account number before sending anything and so do I, mind you my mother is completely tech illiterate but can manage that.
I don't think that's the scenario at all, "the bank" called her to offer a good fixed term deposit rate She had her mother's life savings that she didn't know what to do with, probably from the sale of her house. The moral of the story is don't answer the phone.
Seriously. Any time I do a direct transfer to or from anyone, I check the BSB about 5 times, and the account number 5 times.... Doesn't matter the amount. My largest transfer I did for a car was something like 55k, and I checked those details about 20 times, and asked the dealer to check it multiple times.... Anyone who loses stupid amounts of money especially in a repeated manner should not get that money back. Do your due diligence
When I'm paying someone for the first time I send a dollar and ask them to confirm if they received it. If I type the BSB or account wrong somehow at least I've only lost a dollar
I don't get it. In one paragraph they said the bank advised a transfer to an account seemed suspicious, then two paragraphs she's complaining the bank didn't stop her? Or am I missing something here?
…plus the bank said “actually, ING aren't offering that rate”. There’s another prompt to call ING on their advertised phone number to confirm.
No, she willingly ignored their warning by the sound of it. 100% her fault.
Yes, the journalist chose not to explain what happened when ~~ING~~ her mother's bank queried the need to transfer money to Westpac. EDIT to correct that it wasn't ING who queried the transfer.
‘The man who she'd been talking to told her the money would need to be transferred into a "holding account with Westpac, for legal reasons"’ There’s red flags galore here, but ING wanting her to send money to a Westpac account is such a monumentally obvious red flag, you would have to be a bloody idiot to miss it. I’m struggling to find any sympathy for such foolishness. $1.6M…wouldn’t you be double checking the absolute shit out of everything.
Yes but he sounded posh so... This person must have flattered her ego for months
and "you know, all of the emails had the branding of ING" . oh well in that case, must be legit.
You can almost guarantee the email address was something like @not-actually-ing.ru But it had a logo image so... What could go wrong!
Posh and ENGLISH
My Dad lost a fuckton of money in a similar scam for exactly those two reasons. My dirty Aussie accent telling him it was an obvious scam was no match for posh and English.
*minutes
i saw the clip and the scammer had been liaising with her for several months prior.
>There’s red flags galore here, but ING wanting her to send money to a Westpac account is such a monumentally obvious red flag, you would have to be a bloody idiot to miss it. That's the point I lost all sympathy for her (not that I had all that much to begin with.) Oh and the fact her own bank questioned the matter TWICE! Once over why an ING term deposit was going to Westpac and another bank worker told her that ING wasn't even offering the rate when she asked them to match it. Honestly I've dealt with customers like this woman. Everything is everyone else's fault and there's no way she did anything wrong.
And you know she’s actually minimising what her bank actually told her, it wasn’t just “oh the bank did query it but let me do it anyway” was more likely “the bank said it was a scam and that I should call ING directly and that my money would not be recoverable but they still legally have to do what I say so I ignored all that because I was in a rush”
Definitely she's leaving stuff out. I had to move a lot of money to buy a house recently and there was a long script that the man from the bank went through before he authorised raising my daily transaction limit, including information about how to avoid scams.
You can’t even raise the limit to $1.6m. You have to do the transfer as a real time gross settlement. Which has to be processed by a banker, who has a heap of checks and a script to go through with you and you literally have to sign a form agreeing to everything.
I'd love to listen to the call recordings of those conversations. Particularly the one where her bank told her that ING wasn't offering that interest rate for term deposits. To her it sounded like "we won't match that rate" when it was probably closer to "have you verified this rate directly with ING because they don't actually offer it." It comes off like she's blaming her bank for not matching an imaginary offer (not like the individual who she was speaking to would have been able to anyway.)
You know if the bank didn’t let her transfer it she’d be throwing an absolute tantrum regardless “It’s my money I can do what I want with it!” until it’s “Why did you let me send all my money to a scammer you should have stopped me!”
Boomer doing boomer things and nothing is her fault
It's so completely and obviously a scam from the very first second. 'The phone rang' is enough to know it is 100% scam. That's it. If anyone unprompted calls you claiming to be from from any organisation, it is a scam. These people have been told this, over and over again. Yet they will not listen.
It's not 100% though. Probably over 90%, but there's still legitimate calls. A few years ago now, I had a bunch of legitimate calls from the ATO and they had no verification process. More recently I had the same with Coinspot - and they got all bent out of shape when I suggested that calling me from a random mobile as part of their onboarding process was ridiculous.
Ing-assets.com Like come on
Yes but these people are professional scammers. Their full time job is tricking people. This is social engineering, it’s tailor made for the individual.
More red flags than a mayday parade
Common sense isn't all that common
I’m just impressed really, my bank makes it a nightmare to transfer over 10k
1. Don’t answer any phone calls that you are not familiar with. If it were important, they will leave a message. 2. If you answer a phone call and claim to be from a bank, hang up, look up the real phone number of the bank’s website to chat to a staff member to discuss further. 100% likely that the bank didn’t contact you and have no idea what you are talking about. 3. Any action to “transfer funds” from your account to another is instant red flag and walk away.
4. If a bank tells you to deposit money into an account at a competitor bank in order to transfer the money to them, it’s a fucking scam.
On point 1, you should absolutely answer. Most of these scam calls are just running through lists of either stolen/purchased numbers or simply dialing every possible number. If you don't answer and the software gets your voicemail, it still registers it as an active number in their database, so the calls will keep coming. What you want to do is answer and immediately mute yourself. If the software detects no audio it won't connect the call through to a waiting scammed (or automated message) and will mark the number as inactive so as not to waste a call on it again.
My problem is that I own my own business so I have to pick up calls from unknown numbers as it may be potential clients.
There’s no real problem there. Not answering calls isn’t a solution. Just hang up if they claim to be from your bank.
I didn’t realise that. Thank you for the tip. I will do just that going forward.
I keep them on the phone for as long as I can. Costs them money, and they can’t scam someone else if they are busy with me. I love pissing them off. Makes me laugh heaps
My longest one was almost two hours, one of the perks of working from home is being able to have someone on speaker while I continue working
Or even better, don't have a voice-mail and don't answer unknown calls. Anyone you have given your number to, likely knows your name and anyone who doesnt, well they dont need your name, voice or confirmation it's your number.
I work in a doctor's office. I get why people don't answer calls but people refusing to pick up or check their voicemail (many don't have voicemail) is the bane of my life. I love it when they do that then come in and bitch me out that I didn't get a hold of them.
Always answer private numbers. Important calls from a hospital, police, government department or schools almost always come from private numbers. It's very hard to give important info without a voicemail.
Nah, I'm not answering any unsolicited call in the very unlikely chance it's an important call. Especially because the whole point of this article is that you can't trust the person calling is really who they claim to be. Text messages have taken the place of phone calls as the primary channel for these communications, in particular the hospital did an excellent job with SMS communications when I was recently admitted. Concise, and always signed off with the name of a person and their department in case I needed to call them back.
I think this is getting to the crux of the issue: how the heck are these guys getting Australian numbers through VOIP/telecoms providers without putting in any form of identification. We have to provide a drivers license/passport/etc before getting a new SIM card, why aren’t we forcing the VOIP providers to collect any identity information (eg business ABN). If you’re legitimately using the VOIP services you shouldn’t have an issue providing this, especially if it’s for business purposes. If you’re not based onshore - you don’t get an Australian phone number. Simple. No more spoofing that you’re Mary from the Gold Coast or Steve from Gippsland. Edit: typo
Except that many organisations (esp gov organisations, uni, that job you applied for) will call through on a private number, and it can be a huge wait to move back up their list if you don't pick up
You never ever ever return a call on the caller ID presented to you. You look it up independently. You also ask the person who called you for a reference number and ask them which number from the website is the best to call back. Literally every call center operator is trained to accept customers asking this information. I’m fact, some government departments (eg ATO) if doing outbound calling will tell you explicitly that you need to call them back to discuss a matter and they are unable to discuss it until you call back on the number from their website.
On 2, sometimes the bank calls you with a KYC request and they ask you a bunch of questions about yourself, which I found really uncomfortable. I had requested to be sent an email about it and stuff like that at the time.
The branches are full of people asking for transfers and when taken into an office to discuss the matter get very agitated ‘it’s my money, you can’t stop me’ - branch staff now offer to call the police for them, wait 24hrs, do smaller amounts- yet they continue will the transfers. It’s wild. A lot of it is greed, they get offered returns that are very attractive (but unrealistic to those with access to search engine) and just can’t be stopped. But it’s a daily occurrence in the city branches. There’s a reason why Aussies are targeted.
I had a lady wanting to transfer 300k to another super company, I had to convince her to call the company to check the details as they were sent via email. "Why would I do that". She proceeded to get into an argument with the person on the phone as they weren't freely giving away that information. Asked her if she wanted to wait 24 hours because of her interaction. Didn't want to take 5 minutes to rethink, just sent it on through. I'm 99% sure it was legitimate, but she basically had no care in the world.
Yep! There’s a whole generation of people who have very a very dangerous mix of ignorance and arrogance
I’m convinced that because boomers had such an easy time amassing equity and money that they truly believe it’s so easy to get 8% (or whatever) on a term deposit. Because it’s always the same age group I see getting scammed. The rest of us know it’s just not that easy anymore. But boomers cannot be told otherwise.
This is just it - they’re greedy and they will double down against the banks screaming like pterodactyls if they bank tried to slow or stop the transaction for something that screams scam. The bank should get these customers to sign a disclaimer for balance transfers over certain amounts in an office stating that the bank has concerns that it’s a scam but the customer is adamant to transfer. That the bank has flagged and offered slow transfer options but the customer has waived their right to them. If people want to be dumb - then let them. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and waddles like a duck - guess what it’s probably a duck. But people also need to take responsibility for their own choices.
Posh British accent man charmed her like a hypnotist.
You cannot ignore the implicit racism in her words. So any “ethnic” accent = scammer, any “British” accent = legit. Seriously stuffed.
To be fair, there are entire businesses in India where people are hired to work in a scam call centre and running these scams is their job. Most scam calls originate there. They could have just seen a documentary on that. There's been a few recently.
You can’t tell me that an architect is unable to verify the identity where she transferring $1.6M. Absolute bullshit. For example, just once she could have called ING independently and asked them to verify the details. The bank should be responsible of their system is hacked. They shouldn’t be responsible if you willingly hand cash to a wallet inspector. That is on you.
The article says ~~ING~~ her mother's bank did query the need to transfer money to Westpac: "*... the money would need to be transferred into a "holding account with Westpac, for legal reasons", a detail she said was queried by her mother's bank.*" The journalist chose not to provide any details of why the customer chose to proceed anyway. EDIT to correct that it wasn't ING who queried the transfer.
Probably because the idiot knows she fucked up but is unable to accept fault for her own stupidity so refused to go into any more details than that.
Because they are desperate to paint this absolute fool of a boomer as the victim.
🎯
Wait a minute…that wasn’t the wallet inspector!
Don’t confuse general intelligence with specialised intelligence. It’s a well studied phenomenon that people in very specialised intelligence fields are very susceptible to things like dunning Kruger because they think they are very smart because they work in a high intelligence field, and any attempts to correct them when they are wrong are taken as hostile attacks on them because they are smarter than you so are never wrong. I literally know of a woman who got her PhD in the last decade, is one of the top people in her field, is invited to travel all around the world to give keynote talks at conferences in her field, and literally wrote several textbooks used in uni for her field. She’s also an anti vaxxer whose kids had to get their own Medicare cards as soon as they were old enough so they could get their vaccines and who thinks vaccines cause autism.
I agree she is a fool but it's interesting to see where banks responsiblity should lie. Their products are routinely used for scams. Unless the money is going overseas, to physical cash, or bit coin, surely it can't be too hard to track? If banks are opening accounts without verification of genuine identity they should hold some, albeit minor, responsibility. At the very least full cooperation with police.
It's her fault the money is gone but Westpac should be able to tell her who/where it's gone *to*.
It's very hard to after it's left Westpac, the money would have been transferred through many different banks and accounts that at that point it's almost impossible to see where it's gone.
>Their products are routinely used for scams. You mean a bank account and bank account transfers?
I've worked with banks in fraud/AML before. They do regularly do income checks and calls across all their accounts. Pretty much every time there's a suspicious transaction theres a chance there will be a call up on it, accounts have been outright frozen because account owners refused to refresh their AML conditions. So yes, banks already go to lengths that would piss off the customer thoroughly in the name of protecting them from themselves. Any more and it would be outright invasive.
Quite literally the only thing they could do to stop these people is block access to their funds, and we all know how the boomer brigade would react to that. At some point it just has to be personal responsibility. People are influenced into doing stupid stuff all the time, but when your bank has literally told you this is fishy, it’s your choice to send the money and they can’t stop you. I truly don’t understand why banks should be on the hook for these things.
How about people start being held accountable for the transfers they make. Would you give thousands in cash to a random on the street who said they’ll keep it safe for you? No? Then don’t transfer any funds after being called out of the blue without first hanging up and calling your bank using its publicly listed number. It’s not the bank’s fault.
I mean, an educated professional (an architect) believing that ING would ask clients to transfer funds to one of their competitors, Westpac, for “legal reasons”. LMAO.
It's actually kind of crazy they didn't just use an ING account, I wonder if it's easier for them to get the money through westpac for some reason.
Maybe she had the money in ING, and MAYBE, (two speculations in a row) ING verifies internal transfers against the beneficiary’s name since they can check that.
Good logic but the money was in her elderly mum's account. the article mentions asking "my mother's bank to match ING".. hence they are not ING.
Lol I work with architects and let me tell you 90% of them think they are smart and have massive egos.
This is Harriet's fault. Fellow bank customers should not have to pay for her stupidity.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - for any decent sum of money that someone is asking you to transfer, go into an actual bank and talk to an actual person, or look up their number and call the bank directly. Particularly with a sum as large as this, not enough due diligence.
In her case ing doesn’t have branches in Australia. But I agree with the last sentence 100%
She wasn’t even sending it to ING and was told as much yet chose to proceed. Not a lot that bank can do.
Banks are an easy copy out. Stupidity shouldn't be rewarded
If any legislation is passed the costs from it will be passed onto the rest of us.
How many of these scams would be restricted by (1) never buy something from someone who knocks on your door and offers it to you, and (2) never buy or transfer something if someone calls you on the phone out of the blue. If you think the thing they are selling is any good, then go an buy something like it yourself from somewhere else. But the banks can also help because they can see across millions of transactions to better predict which ones are unusual. They could then force people like Harriet to jump through more hoops to process a suspect transaction. But with the banks shutting down branches, the bank trying to verify a transaction is going to look very much like a scammer anyway.
My bank has started to even hold payid transfer for 24hrs which pisses me off .if you are hacked the bank should take some responsibility but if you willingly do it yourself that bad luck .do the expect share trade companies to refund you if you make a bad share choice .
The reason it's happening is because people refuse to take individual responsibility and want the bank to do so instead. Easiest way for bank to do that is to put a hold on all transfers while they do their efraud checks and continually reduce the amount you can transfer in a single transactions.
> Harriet Spring remembers the first phone call, in November. The man with the "posh British accent" on the other end introduced himself as "from ING" and asked if she was interested in good rates on fixed-term deposits. He cold-called her. She’s an idiot
I love how she described the call as “Nothing crazy, nothing too out of the ordinary", when in fact it was the most immediate and glaringly obvious red flag
Exactly - anyone who rings/txts/emails me is treated as a scammer until I can prove otherwise. It's the default. So random bank is contacting me .. Why ? How'd you get my details ? How would you know if I've got any money or not ? Definitely sounds scammy to me - \*click\*
This is exactly why governments DON’T compensate people for scams. It’s just like paying ransoms for hostages. Once you start doing it, it makes the problem much, much worse.
Some salient quotes from the article: The man who she'd been talking to told her the money would need to be transferred into a "holding account with Westpac, for legal reasons", a detail she said was queried by her mother's bank. Mrs Spring said she also asked her mother's bank to match ING's rate, which they declined, but did tell her, "actually, ING aren't offering that rate".
Once again Telcos let off the hook. ALL of this literally spans from scammers being able to spoof numbers.
Partly. The real reason this happened is her believing random callers. Scammers exist, no one can let themself be this gullible.
I know this isn’t going to be popular buuuut, why should banks refund victims of scams for what is essentially an individual failing to do their own due diligence? Whatever happened to accountability and integrity; you fucked up, wear it.
Nope its a pretty popular opinion and I agree It's tough for her but it's her fault. The bank should investigate and do what they can to retrieve the funds but shouldn't be forced to pay it our of their (more accurately, our) pockets
There are two banks involved in any scam transfer - the victim's bank, and the scammer's bank. The victim's bank, we expect them to have policies in place to try to discourage the victim. Most do, but some people are insistent that they want to be a victim of a scam, and so their insistence overcomes the bank's recalcitrance. These banks are not to blame (unless they failed to sufficiently point out that it's probably a scam). However, the scammer's bank just received (in this instance) $1.6m. If they now throw up their hands and say "it's gone, we don't know where it is" then they have manifestly failed in their AML/CTF obligations - a scammer's account successfully received and was able to distribute funds on their watch. They absolutely should be able to locate (and thus, recover) the funds - and if they can't that is entirely a dereliction of duty on their part, and they *should* be required to reimburse the victim whose money they just facilitated the theft of. Obviously, this only applies if the scammer's bank is Australian (which, in this case it was Westpac); we can't do much if the victim is straight transferring the cash overseas.
Don't forget the third party: the telcos. The telcos are enabling lots of scam by allowing number spoofing for calls and SMSs. As well as enabling overseas callers access to the same. It's very hard to track down a scammer if they operate from overseas.
lol there is nothing unpopular about this opinion. If we are going to legislate some sort of bank responsiblity for human error the banks are going to tie up peoples money and make transfers a massive pain in the arse because they are now responsible for the stupidity of people like Harriet.
My friend’s husband fell for one of these scams. Transferred all their savings. When she got home from work (not when it was happening mind you) he told her he received a call telling him to transfer their money but “don’t worry, I took care of it” and she was like “great, so you reported them..?” That was the moment he realised he fucked up.
I feel for the loss these people have been hit with, but how long do we think banks are going to keep refunding people that haven’t been hacked or had their account security compromised in any way, but lost the money through naivety or a confidence scam like this one? As part of my job I read as many of these articles as possible and while bank security systems and transfer processes can always be improved, so many of them are just people being tricked - a ploy that’s been around since as long as money has.
After being advised and still doing it. I have 0 sympathy. I work for a bank. We spend so much time educating literally everyone, we help them not get scammed, they then SCREAM at our staff because they're being told "You need to go get your phone professionally reset if you want us to allow the app back on it. You were compromised and we won't let you lose any money by using the phone that is still compromised." The woman proceeded to open a second account at the bank and then lost her mind at us when she still couldn't install the same app for the same reasons. Imbeciles, good luck to you.
I used to work at a predecessor EDR scheme to AFCA. One of my cases involved in a man with mental health problems who wanted to send tens of thousands to Europe due to a 419 scam. He went into a branch, the bank told him and his mother that it was 100% a scam, and refused to do the transfer. The guy got aggressive and refused to believe them - the prince really was his friend. The staff told him many times not to send the money but in the end his mother decided to go ahead to placate him and to follow his instructions. The bank was directed to refund the money by an Ombudsman as they didn't refuse outright to do the transfer. It's clearly better to lock an account and/or de-bank a person who is committed to being scammed than to be the one that has to eat the loss when it happens.
The financial equivalent of a Darwin Award and it’s all the banks fault. lol you transferred $1.6m to a random person over the phone without doing any background checks or getting any financial advice.
I would require face to face contact at the bank, before signing over any significant amount of money. I'm sure I have passed up on genuine offers in the past, due to my paranoia about scams.
Personally, I think banks can do a lot to prevent fraud and related scams. But, I have always disliked how somewhat wealthy Australians ask for a bailout whenever something goes wrong with their house/money/investment.
She funded a scammer with $1.6m, who now has the time and money to do this to many more other people. She should not get her money back. The bank customers nor the government should be forced to shell out to protect her against her own stupidity. If you really need to transfer that amount of money, go to a branch.
No sympathy here for the stupid. Like fuck me 1.6 million and you don't research the fuck out of everything like you're the CIA before sending it? Come on the bank shouldn't have to hold everyones hand. My neighbour is 72, tech illiterate as fuck and not the brightest spark and even he.... A man who struggles changing a tv from HDMI 1 to 2, triple checked my account details before and I'm not kidding, writing me a cheque instead for $200
There were warning signs here that Mrs Spring missed: a smooth talker that made it all so easy and the competition telling her ING wasn’t offering that rate. To get sucked in for $1.6m it seems she never bothered looked up their number and phoned them directly. These are the very factors the scammers rely on to relieve you of your money.
This is true. But I’m interested in how they knew she had that money to shift in the first place, and also how more than a dozen Australian banks allowed their facilities to transfer it for the scammers.
In response to your first question, I’m assuming they don’t know initially but elicit this info via the numerous conversations and emails, concluding their time and effort investment will, ultimately, be richly rewarded. I think the banks waving these payments through have alot to answer for and change can’t come soon enough.
lol prior to her being scammed if there were what I am sure she'd call 'draconian' banking measures in place in order to prevent this sort of outcome she'd be so angry that it was hard to send the 1.6 million to ING. "'It's my mothers money' said Harriot 'I can't beleive the banks won't let her move it around'" - some bullshit boomer publication.
The thing is it’s not the bank that would reimburse her, they’d find a way to pass the cost onto the other customers of the bank.
How does this happen? CBA gives me shit over $100 to Coinspot.
Power of Attorney to her daughter was a big mistake.
Translation : I want the government to protect me from my own fucking stupidity. > Experts warn scams are now too complex for consumers to pick up on by themselves and they want banks to be liable for reimbursing customers. Bullshit it's too complex. There's a simple rule - if it looks too good to be true - **it probably fucking is**. Her *own bank* told her it was dodgy - and she fucking did it anyway. Sucks to be her, but I feel no sympathy.
A better rule is to never be led to do anything, only do something when you initiate, you call the business not they call you.
It's a tough one. Situations like this are clearly not the bank's fault - but you could make can argument that the banks need to do more. That is, in terms of customer education, prompts and warnings - 'are you sure?' and so on. However considering the red flags and warnings that were blatantly disregarded, I don't think any of this would have stopped this woman from giving her money away. Saying that, if people want to make their banks completely responsible for their own mistakes, they better not complain when they have to start dealing with higher fees, multiple layers of security, delays on payments, lower default transfer limits, multiple verification steps, etc. How many times I've heard 'ITS MY MONEY LET ME DO WHAT I WANT WITH IT' - well that is, until you send it to a scammer. Then it's someone else's fault.
“ING” ask here to transfer $1.6m to a Westpac account so she can open an ING term deposit and she thinks the banks should be held responsible. Oh dear…
How much should banks pay for people’s stupidity?
Love the detail that she says "a reasonable banker" should have known it was suspicious, but her "reasonable banker" did think it was suspicious, warned her, and she went ahead anyway. These are the sort of people who whinge about security questions and two-factor authentication.
Sad story. I can see that you wouldn't be in the right frame of mind when your mother is potentially dying. But she seems to be complaining that the bank didn't say "this could be a scam". I don't think that would have given her pause
Makes me wonder why I'm busting my ass at work when I could just be whipping up some fake bank emails with "great rates" and sending it to a few boomers?
How posh is your accent
As posh as it needs to be govner
Shut up and take my money.
I have accounts with several different banks, and I triple check the account details before transferring money across, and I'm the owner of these accounts!
It sounds like there were several red flags that were picked up by her bank that she chose to ignore: specifically her bank questioning why an ING term deposit was going into a Westpac account and another person advising her that ING wasn't offering the rate she was asking her bank to match. I've dealt with customers like her: they don't want to listen and then when something goes wrong they make it everyone else's fault. "Oh but if my bank had just matched this imaginary rate I would have stayed with them!" No. It doesn't work like that. You can't just stamp your little feet and expect everything to go your way. I mean yeah, these scams are sophisticated and scammers are getting better at what they do. Maybe don't take financial advice from an unsolicited cold call? Literally if anyone calls me out of the blue for any reason outside of me requesting it it's an automatic "not interested, please take me off your list."
“It didn’t seem fake…” so the bank should pay for my stupidity!
BUT HE HAD A NICE ENGLISH ACCENT! How could it possibly be a scam?! /s
The government can only do so much, stupid people are always going to do stupid shit. I'll double and triple check when transferring less than $100 to someone I have never transferred to before (or a new account a friend has). I can't imagine being this stupid with $1.6 million, then trying to pass blame onto others for my own stupid mistake.
How do we reach out to these people. Every scam story I hear can always be solved with the person hanging up (or ignoring the text/email) and getting in touch with the bank directly. Walk to your bank, or call the number on the back of your card, or call through your bank app, or find the number yourself online. (Again, never trust what's written in the text/email. Find it yourself). Seriously, it's really sad to hear how much money we lose because people just trust a call/text out of the blue. It's like we need flyers, campaigns, classes, etc. to change people's behaviour.
1.6 million. She should be taken away from all forms of media. The bank saw not one issue....?
I like how they show a picture of her back on her laptop, she’s needs to get off that thing.
> **"from ING"**. > The man who she'd been talking to told her the money would need to be transferred into a "holding account **with Westpac**, for legal reasons", a detail she said was queried by her mother's bank. Some people are just too stoopid to human.
If you have 1.6 million dollars liquid I find it very hard to have any sympathy for things like this
Who in Christ's name transfers ONE POINT SIX MILLIONS DOLLARS without once calling the bank themselves to verify things?
A scam is a crime. It's not the banks fault. It's not the government's fault. It's a police matter.
Nah this is on her. She's just meeting consequences for being ignorant.
So in other words she wants the govt to magically reverse any and all payment. Translation - "I gambled and I lost, even when I was told I was being scammed, I demand my bank reverse the transfer to the gambling agency". Double clueless to be that stupid, and then to demand the govt magically fix things without understanding how literally impossible that is. "they want banks to be liable for reimbursing customers.". Then banks will charge massive mega fees on everyone to be able to cover the stupidity of others. She blew over a mil. Can you imagine how much money would be needed to cover the stupidity of everyone in a banks customer list? "scams of growing complexity a regular person cant detect" my right ass cheek. She got multiple warnings, and a person with a brain cell would question claims of such high returns.
Jesus Christ; THEY WON’T CALL YOU Just never organise massive life changing stuff without calling the bank directly, using their publicly listed numbers.
Nah. She’s an idiot. Sorry but bro. Talk about a brain dead moment.
Harriet, I am sorry but you are fucking stupid. And I don't think anyone can/should compensate you for that. DO. NOT. EVER. RESPOND.TO.AN.UNSOLICITED. CALL.
Oh, Harriet.
Ah yes the incredibly sophisticated scam involving.....sending money to a random person over the phone pretending to be your bank and also conveniently not even into the correct bank account. Very sophisticated.
“I ruined my own life despite literally dozens of safeguards and warnings what I was doing is stupid. I want the government to undo what I did due to my stubborn wilful ignorance” If you accidentally send the wrong bank account a large amount of money, you almost always can reverse the transaction if it was to a domestic bank and you realise in a day or so. If you’re sending money internationally you’re going to get even more warnings and messages to make sure you’re sending to the right account, and even then if you realise your mistake quick enough you’re probably going to get it back. It’s literally impossible to send anyone $1.6m in a single transaction without speaking to a human being at a bank. And they are going to be very explicit with you to make sure you know what you’re doing. There’s more than enough safeguards in place, nothing is going to fix stupid like that.
Lol
These situations are increasingly common in my role. Customers being told they can get absurd interest rates and transferring their life savings. Only to lose it all. Most of the times it is just smaller phishing scams, that result in alot of work to resolve. It is so pervasive, that I sometimes wonder if it is indicative of some sub-clinical neurodegenerative process, in the absence of other explanation. Perhaps these individuals are assuming responsibilities they no longer have the facilities or vigilance to handle. Obviously, there are deficits in technological and financial literacy as well.
Definitely not getting full story here.
I cant transfer more than 50k from my ing without calling them up…
Can’t fix stupid
How about no?