End this fraud epidemic
TO yOur bank, fraud is a number on a spreadsheet. They get hundreds of thousands of cases a year and file them away under case names such as 2017/19799 or 2017/19800.
It’s become a large problem — and big firms such as Santander employ teams of people to investigate claims.
But you only have to read the heart-rending stories on pages 38 and 43 to sense the devastation caused to victims such as Alex Luke, who was robbed of her family’s £180,000 nest egg, and Adrian Sear, whose wedding plans were left in tatters.
This cannot be allowed to keep happening. The system is broken.
And it seems in Santander’s case, catastrophically so. Like other banks, Santander claims it works tirelessly to tackle fraud.
But the flood of letters you’ve sent us in the past few weeks suggest it is treating victims too harshly — and leaving them unnecessarily exposed to danger.
Once the scale of its shortcomings became clear, we felt it our duty to alert the City watch- dog and warn the public. The Financial Conduct Authority says it is taking our dossier ‘ very seriously’. It is imperative it acts swiftly to find out how crooks are exploiting the flaws in Santander’s security safeguards. We’ll report back with its findings.
Not only have Santander’s customers been left exposed by a system supposed to protect them, they’ve been left out of pocket by box-ticking customer service staff who refuse to admit the bank could be at fault.
If you gave any details to a fraudster, they say you’re to blame. Case closed, there’s nothing to see here, guv. But what the Santander bigwigs in their HQ just off regent’s Park can’t seem to grasp is that we don’t all live in London and do our banking on the latest smartphones.
No customer in their right mind would deliberately hand thousands of pounds to a criminal — and Santander readily admits its customers are being deceived by vile con artists who play on fear.
yet it still expects people who never use online banking to spot when they are being duped and understand how its text message payment code system works.
That’s doubly unfair, because our investigation found these Santander text message codes, which verify online payments, and its fraud warning alerts are routinely manipulated by crooks. In other words, fraudsters have found weaknesses in Santander’s systems and customers are being left utterly exposed.
It’s unacceptable for the firms we trust to keep our money safe to stand by and do nothing as your life savings disappear in a blizzard of rogue payments.
The banking laws say customers should be refunded where the bank is at fault. So Santander should really be refunding every penny stolen by fraudsters who have exploited its security loopholes. Meanwhile, it must overhaul its systems to make them safer.
My message to Santander — and all banks and building societies — is simple: work with us, not against us, to stop these fraudsters.
Age concerns
AFTEr years of rises, the state pension age is now likely to hit 68 for anyone under 45.
The recommendations were made by Sir John Cridland in a report that took him a year to publish, but had so few radical suggestions or improvements to the current plans ( a reduced pension for retiring early, for example?), it could have been written in half an hour.
If the Government goes ahead with Sir John’s plan, where will all the extra jobs for pensioners come from? At least this time — unlike when women were given short notice that they’d have to work until 66, not 60 — we’re being warned early.
A tax on dying
KEEP writing to your MP and ministers in protest against these nasty new death taxes coming in this May. And do send us any responses you get.
The brunt will once again fall on the squeezed middle- classes (in England and Wales, as the tax is different in Scotland).
I have no doubt rich aristocratic types are already paying solicitors and advisers to work up ruses to skirt around the new fees. If only we all had that luxury.
This disastrous tax hike simply has to go.