the internet just opened up the ability for any scammer on the planet to have a go, at least when it was snake oil they needed to pull their horsedrawn wagon up in front of you.īut regardless of what's being sold, promised or threatened, the words of Thomas Tusser and Phineas Taylor Barnum are as true today as they ever were. before the internet people went convinced to buy bridges and bottles of snake oil.

Scammers try to con people through a combination of psychological engineering - sound genuine, have just enough facts to engender trust, be confident, have a believable threat, and leverage the lack of knowledge of the technologically unwitting. when in doubt she calls me to ask, and every occasion is a learning opportunity. My mum is 75 years old and can spot a scammer a mile away based on a combination of simple skepticism (no free lunches) and basic logic.

I like your idea, but the problem is that the person who is stupid enough to fall for the scam in the first place is inherently too stupid to learn the lesson itself. you could give people 2FA tokens, or require biometric scans, and the scammers will still talk victims into bypassing their own security. we're already well past the point where security is annoying to protect the overcredulous. and if the bank ratchets up the security further then all they do is piss off customers genuinely trying to access their own funds. The customer will then complain bitterly that 'the bank didn't do enough to protect them'.

so the bank staff question customers requesting large cash withdrawals to try and prevent them being scammed, and the scammer will have told the victim to lie and say the money is to buy a car. whatever the bank puts in place, the scammers just react to it.Īn example is that a scammer threatening someone over an alleged tax debt or something will tell the victim to go to a bank in person and withdraw cash, which makes it impossible to do a transaction reversal. a significant volume of their complaints come from people who were scammed, and were coached by the scammer to deliberately override every security measure that was put in place for their protection. Click to expand.my wife is part of a complaints process for a major bank.

Ultraviewer when did they start