ECONOMY

£25,000 stolen online. But even more shocking: Barclays washes its hands of it

Online banking: Is it now a must to avoid?
Online banking: Is it now a must to avoid? Photograph: Brian Jackson/Alamy

It’s not just the fact that a “life-changing” £25,000 was stolen from a couple scraping together the money to build an extension. It’s not even the fact that they fell victim to the clearly very sophisticated hijacking of an email account. What is truly shocking about the above story is how the bank appears to know who stole the money – but is prepared to do almost nothing about it.

The Fishers, from London, were conned into paying £25,000 into a fraudster’s account at Barclays Bank, believing it to be their builder’s legitimate account.

This was not caused by their stupidity or incompetence: I challenge anyone not to fall for this sort of nasty scam, facilitated by “spyware” on a computer. But for this scam to work, the fraudster needed to open a UK bank account, and he chose Barclays.

This week I tried to open an account at Barclays. It was impossible without giving the bank my full name, date of birth, addresses for the past three years, email address, phone number, income and employment details, including my full company address. It also required permission from me to make checks on everything I submitted.

We know the fraudster handed all these details to Barclays, because it has told us the account was opened entirely correctly. We also know the account was cleaned out very soon after the money was transferred by the Fishers.

If you were witness to a mugging, and saw the mugger jump into a car and drive off, you’d do your best to scribble down the car’s number plate and give it to the victim. Barclays knows far, far more detail of the mugger in this instance, but won’t give anything to the Fishers. The only fragment of information they have been able to discern is that the fraudster’s name might be “Harry’’.

They are flabbergasted that Barclays is doing so little to help.

Barclays said it would not disclose details of the account for “data protection reasons” and, alarmingly, does not report scam claims to the police because the bank itself is not the victim. In other words, it “witnessed” the crime, but will do nothing to help because it didn’t lose any money itself.

The police have been little better, with the Fishers running into a pass-the-parcel situation, with no real action taken.

How did we get into this position, where crimes are committed but the observers and the authorities, even in possession of crucial leads, do next to nothing to help?

The overall UK crime figures have been falling for years, we’re told. It’s undeniable that home break-ins and thefts from cars have been in steep decline. But last October it was revealed that once online fraud is included, the real crime figure almost doubles.

There were an estimated 5.1 million online frauds in the UK last year, or nearly half of all offences recorded in the country in 2015.

When theft involved nicking cash from houses or from people on the street it was inevitably a job for the police. But now that half of all crime is online it has to involve a financial institution of some sort. There is no other way the money can be transmitted. The banks, whether they like it or not, are the conduits for soaring crime levels. For a bank as big as Barclays just to wash its hands of the matter is shameful.

Why are they so indifferent? Maybe they don’t want to frighten their customers. Or their regulators. In any case, they have passed on much of the cost of fraud to the customers, so why bother investing to deter it, or in chasing the crooks?

In the meantime, all of us need to think seriously about how we do banking online. The Cambridge professor who is perhaps the UK’s top online security expert says he himself won’t bank online. Now is that really what the likes of Barclays want us all to do?

[Source:- Gurdian]