Fighting for your money

Scammers bled my father of £300,000 during the pandemic. Why won’t HSBC help him?

Q I am writing on behalf of my parents, who are in desperate need of help after falling victim to a scam in which my 74-year- old father lost his life savings of £300,000.

My mother is in a poor state of health with advanced diabetes and has recently had an operation to try to restore her sight. My father is having to care for her while coming to terms with what has happened and attempting to deal with the banks and credit card companies to secure some redress. He is still being targeted daily by scammers, who have now clearly shared his contact details far and wide.

It is a precarious situation. My father is not in a fit state to represent himself to the banks properly and the wider family are concerned that this will lead to an unjust outcome.

Having reviewed the full details, I truly believe that my father has not only been coerced and manipulated into a sophisticated scam, but has been failed by the providers of his bank account and credit cards. The majority of the losses have occurred through his main bank, HSBC, with which he has been an account holder for more than 40 years. We have helped my father to prepare a spreadsheet of all the transactions and he has submitted it to HSBC and has had several interviews with representatives. However, they have been totally unsympathetic and he has been passed from department to department and there is no one single point of contact.

I spoke to HSBC after I discovered recently that fraud was still occurring on the account – even after the scam was reported. I was incandescent and requested that the bank put an international payments bar on his account, but was told this could not be done. I also asked it to apply safeguarding measures and for a proposal as to how my father could continue to live with no ready cash. But nothing was offered.

Not enough questions were asked when many large payments were made and Isas closed, with no query over what the funds were going to be used for. My father is a man of impeccable character and a pillar of the local community. He is one of life’s “good guys” who has worked hard all his life to serve, and I am horrified as to how impersonally and cruelly he is being dealt with.

– Anon

AIwas dismayed to learn how your poor father fell victim to a string of heinous investment scams, which meant that once the culprits had their claws in him they did not let go until they had bled him dry.

You listed a few of the “investment companies” that sucked him in – none of them authorised in Britain. One of them was Marketrip, billed as a stockbroker. Just look up Trustpilot to see how the outside world views this operation. One of the more polite comments I read was “scammity scam scam”.

You told me that your father, being self-employed, had suffered badly during the pandemic and was already in a vulnerable state, worrying about his finances, when the scammers pounced.

The outfit contacted him out of the blue to persuade him to invest and the idea of making good returns must have appeared to be one way out of his financial troubles. But as soon as the first account was opened with a token sum, it set off the spiral that ended in financial disaster and left your father feeling too ashamed to confide in his family.

Once Marketrip – which I see from its website is based in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific – got your father to engage

‘Not enough questions were asked when many large payments were made and Isas closed’

with it with a small investment, it showed him that he was making a strong profit, but rather than letting him take money out it aggressively pushed him to invest more – and then more.

Britain’s City watchdog, the Financial Conduct Authority, first issued a warning about this outfit in May 2020, around the time your father was lured in. It stated: “We believe this firm has been providing financial services or products in the UK without our authorisation.” The FCA said consumers should be “especially wary of dealing with this unauthorised firm”.

Once one dodgy operation succeeds in fleecing an individual, others then flock round. More “brokers” played the same trick on your father until he did not know where to turn. Then scam “fraud recovery” firms promised to help retrieve his losses. Guess what, they didn’t, and simply took more of his money, much of it in the form of credit card payments.

A year passed before you became aware of the mounting problem and by then your father had lost his life savings.

You first contacted me in July this year as you had seen no progress after you reported the fraud to HSBC. I asked the bank to update me on its detective work and urged it to consider returning the money he had lost to these scams because of his vulnerable state.

Your father’s is a complex case, that is evident, which is why it took some weeks to achieve a result. But recently there finally came some good news when HSBC completed its investigations and agreed to refund your father £155,000, about half of his losses.

The bank refused to return all of his money because it said it had warned your father in September 2020 that he was putting his money into a scam – though he does not recall this – and yet he continued to authorise payments.

A spokesman for HSBC said: “While we warned the customer about the payments and placed a temporary block on his card, we recognise that we could have done more to protect him and have therefore issued a partial refund of the total money lost to the scammers.”

Since the scam involved card payments, your father was not covered under the “contingent reimbursement model code”. This is a voluntary arrangement under which the banks that have signed up to it are meant to make refunds on authorised “push payment” frauds carried out via bank accounts – as long as the customer has not been grossly negligent. With card payments it is left up to the bank to decide whether it will refund fraud losses if they are not retrievable under card “chargeback” rules or the protection offered by Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act.

Other cards were used by your father. Marks & Spencer said it appreciated the “extenuating and complex circumstances” of the case and refunded the full £4,000 spent on his credit card as a goodwill gesture. Nationwide, which managed to block certain large payments made from his current account, is looking into retrieving some of the £ 6,500 lost on his credit card. Barclays hopes to raise a chargeback on £15,000 handed over via his credit card but is awaiting further information from your father.

You said your father was extremely grateful for my intervention and that financial catastrophe had been averted for now. But you fear it will take a long time for your parents to recover mentally from the nightmare they have endured. Your father is sadly not alone. During the pandemic victims have fallen for such hard- sell techniques in their droves because of their financially and emotionally vulnerable state. There was a leap of nearly a third to 8,958 reported cases of investment scams in 2020, according to the industry group UK Finance. But many more cases go unreported.

Readers, I cannot emphasise enough that any contact out of the blue, whether by phone, text, email, post or an individual at your front door, must be batted away, however enticing the opportunity seems.

If contact details you receive or find on websites are only mobile numbers or PO box addresses, steer clear. Carry out detailed due diligence. Scrutinise website addresses closely – look for oddities such as the use of a hyphen instead of a space, a “5” instead of an “S”, or an “rn” instead of an “m”. Go to the FCA website to check warnings issued about particular firms. Investments that offer high returns with low risk are fanciful – do not touch them.