The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Money
Criminals hide behind data protection laws
Scammers are being protected by data protection rules that leave their victims in the dark. Bank transfer fraud is fast becoming one of Britain’s most costly crimes – with £236m being stolen last year alone. But those who lose life-changing sums are finding they are left to fend for themselves, while fraudsters can hide behind data protection laws.
Even if the criminal’s account is frozen and some of the stolen money recovered, banks are prevented from telling victims how much of their cash has been saved.
This is because data protection rules mean banks cannot discuss a customer’s details without their permission – even when that customer is a suspected fraudster.
Criminals are protected until fraud investigators can confirm that wrongdoing has taken place, which can take months.
Saqib Qureshi, 48, was tricked into sending his £55,000 house deposit to fraudsters posing as his conveyancer. So-called “Friday afternoon fraud”, named after the time of the week when fraudsters like to strike because they know that banks are about to be shut for two days, is becoming increasingly common.
The fraudsters will hack the solicitor’s email and wait ait until a client is poised to send d a deposit, at which point they tell the he buyer there has been a change of bank ank details. The new bank account t belongs to the criminals.
More than a month after Mr Qureshi was targeted, he is still having trouble getting tting answers from any of the he banks involved or the police. On the same day y the crime happened he e reported it to Lloyds, his bank, which in turn n reported it to Santander, er, the criminal’s bank.
The account was blocked immediately and Santander has confirmed med that some of his money y has been recovered, but won’t tell him how much money will be refunded or when.
“They just keep telling me they can’t talk to me because of data protection,” he said. “Where are you supposed to go? The process just doesn’t work.”
Santander was unable to discuss details of any customer’s account without their permission thanks to data protection laws, said a spokesman, who added: “We are very sympathetic to this situation and the distress caused by being the victim of a scam. We welcome the involvement of The Daily Telegraph and hope that by raising awareness of scams such as email interception with their readers, other people will be prevented from falling victim.”
Santander said the case needed to be thoroughly investigated before it could confirm how much money was left in the account and that it was working with Lloyds to recover as much as possible.
The bank insisted the account was opened “in line with our necessary checks and account opening policy”.
Mr Qureshi reported the crime to Action Fraud, the national body for reporting scams. The case is yet to be fully investigated and was passed to a local police force only this week.
Action Fraud said before a crime could be fully investigated police needed to submit data protection requests to the banks involved – some of which take up to four weeks to respond. A spokesman added: “Action Fraud is experiencing increased demand on its service and this is having an adv adverse impact on the time taken to disse disseminate crimes to police forces for inve investigation.” The num number of crimes reported to Action Fraud soared to 292,044 last year, up from 212,983 in 2013. There we were an additional 102,961 reports in the first four months of this yea year, suggesting the yearly figure will exceed 300,000. Action Fraud said: “We are work working through the backlog, prio prioritising those crimes that cause the most harm to v victims. We apologise for any inconvenience or dis distress this may cause.”
This is little comfort to vic victims. Mr Qureshi said: “If I was mugged in the str street with £1,000 on me th the police would be all over it. I I’ve lost £55,000 here, what what’s the difference?”
Victims lose thousands to fraud but data laws are a safe haven for scammers, reports Sam Meadows