I'm not sure why the banks should police this – to them it's a legitimate transaction. If I lend someone £50 and they go 'ha ha, you ain't getting that back' I can hardly go to the bank and demand they reimburse me because I used their cash machine to take the money out of my account. If I buy a banger that goes all clown car on my driveway... you get the idea. Unless the police ask for help within whatever bounds they have, of course.
I don't want to sound unsympathetic, but there's an element of caveat emptor here, if you hand over money to essentially an unknown stranger with no due diligence (a simple Google search here would have dished the dirt) then I have some money from my dead uncle I need help getting out of the country.
There are many things the banks can do in general, and they are resisting. Every week there are cases in the back pages of the Guardian about people losing five-figure sums in bank transfer fraud.
The most glaring problem is that all that's required for a transfer is the account and sort code. You are asked to enter the account name, but you can put anything you like in there, it's completely ignored. The banks argue it's a tricky problem — is the account in the name JOHN SMITH or J SMITH or JR SMITH AND JP SMITH, etc. I don't think this is an insurmountable problem. They could run a pattern match and if over a certain percentage return the actual account name for you to verify. So if you've entered JON SMYTH it returns the actual account name, if you've entered MJN SOLICITORS it simply says no. This would also help where people have got the numbers wrong by mistake.
Another issue seems to be the ease with which fraudsters seem to be able to open multiple single-use accounts. You and I seem to have to jump through hoops to open an account, so how do the scammers seem to have no problem at all?
One common factor with these scams is that the money hits the empty account and is transferred out immediately and the account is dropped. Surely this is an obvious pattern that could be detected and flagged to a human to investigate before the money's allowed out?
I'm not sure it'd be a good idea to let someone effectively mine their database of account names (and I suspect it's not legal, we've had to strip similar routines from products sold by my mothership). There's obviously a balance between how difficult banks make opening accounts – there's been enough complaints on here about the current hassles. I don't, tbh, know how they open these throwaway accounts, simply changing the name on out account when my wife and I merged finances took made me feel like I was a extra in a extended movie version of
The Trial. But yes, I guess a false passport and a laser printer/copier make it easy.
While not necessarily wishing to defend the banks, whose inherent loveliness may well be questioned, I still think there an element of
caveat emptor, don't give a large sum of money to some anonymous person on Facebook with no due diligence.
