Times: Fraud victims left in the lurch by banks

At 14:33:46 on 19/01/2006, Mike Scott delighted uk.finance by announcing:

No, they don't.

In message , Mike Scott writes

Yes, 'perceived'; benefits will differ, as you say. But an absolute measure of crime is required.

The measures already in place seem ideal : number and overall value.

Again, I will put this down to your lack of experience. The banks stance would be (initially) to tell the customer to report it to the police and give us the authority to disclose info about their account to the police.

If the customer goes to the polise, then the bank could disclose its info.

However, I only know of one occasion in which the bank was absolutely sure the pin had been disclosed to a third party by the customer. In all the other cases it was just 'suspicion' and so we couldnt do anything, except tell the client to report the theft to the police.

In message , Ronald Raygun writes

Yes, that logic is sound, but there is also the aim of reducing the other types as well.

No, it is because to fake the signature you have to steal the card, not because of difficulties with the signature.

But the crads would need to be 'clones' of magstripe cards wouldnt they?

Again your lack of experience shows. 'Mrs Judith Smith' embossed on card, signature 'john smith' presented by a thief who was male with a beard. Unsigned cards used. Etc.,,,,, Ive seen hundreds of examples.

No, the chicks are just stupid.

Well this may come as a bit of a shock, but that has been the case for years. With cheque guarantee cards it was easy to pinpoint, but harder with CCs.

So hasnt it over the last 30 years?

Depends on the business type. Supermarkets is more debit cards, furniture shops credit cards.

Ahh, well mine doesnt have a chip. Is this discrimination?

It IS discrimination!

This looks like we're getting to *your* lack of (more recent) experience. In your day bankers probably had less reason to suspect their own customers of trying to rip them off. One nowadays hears more and more stories of banks actually being so convinced of customer fraud attempts of going to the police themselves. But they do sound a bit fanciful, admittedly, so perhaps they're fabrications.

Yippee! AT LAST!

You might have said earlier. I'd assumed it was much less important because it only represented a minority of existing fraud losses.

No, to fake a signature you can use a cloned card (which is easy) and if you do this onto a virgin blank card, you can put whatever sig you like on it, so any sig you write on a slip at point of use will be easy to make look like the one on the strip.

But if you use a stolen original card with the the legitimate holder's real sig on it (i.e. you didn't manage to intercept it in the post while still blank), you would have to practice signing until it looked enough like the one on the strip. This is more difficult than using blanks.

Indeed. What other kinds are there? :-)

Those are so obviously cases of gross negligence by chicks that they should be jolly well given the sack. How dopey do you have to be to accept a card which has no signature on it? In fact it should have been confiscated on the spot and the police called, and the bearer clapped in irons until he could prove he really was the legitimate cardholder and had simply forgotten to sign his new card which he only received in the post yesterday.

As for different names, well, perhaps that's not so important, and sex discrimination is a thorny subject. But the signatures must match.

In what way were they different?

Perhaps it would have been too expensive compared to the cost of simply underwriting the fraud losses. Pragmatics in action leading to pragmatic inaction. :-)

In message , Ronald Raygun writes

Perhaps you cvpouild give n example?

(BTW my earlier comments related to card misuse only)

But that is 'faking' a signature in the sense that I understand it, i.e. et here trying to copy the original or altering the sig strip. What you decsribe above falls into the 'cloning' category, not signature faking.

None, it means what you are really taking about is cloning, not sig faking.

Sadly, this isnt the case.

Because the thief needed to have the cheque book as well and and the cheque (in those days) was examined by somebody who compared the sig (or knew it already) before the cheque was paid, and it was easy for the branch to get back to the payee and pinpoint blame.

Quite!

I've presented an unsigned card several times, the cashier usually notices and I sign it. Sometimes they ask to look at another card to confirm the signature but not always. I suspect that it's a pretty comon occurrence as the cashiers seemed to be pretty used to it.

So, yes, I agree! :-)

john boyle wrote: ...

To you, evidently. But to others? I may be being selfish, but from a personal point of view I'd rather have a hundred cars vandalised in John O' Groats than a single mugging over the road. I would view the relative values very differently from a north Scot.

Did I notice from another posting that you work (or worked) in banking? That may explain your perceived values. I'm just a customer.

In message , Mike Scott writes

Yes, but Ive spent more time out than in, as it were, and have many times acted on behalf of a client in pursuing their complaint or claim against bank and also as expert witness for the party fighting a bank.

You must read more of my posts then. You will see I certainly dont hang back on criticising banks when appropriate, in fact I think I criticise more than praise.

What I think I do most of is to give facts, because most of what I see in this group is opinion, or opinions posted as though they are facts, which are very often wrong. In this thread I have only ever given facts, whereas others give opinions or (as you say above) what they perceive as being facts.

Ahh! That will explain your perceptions then!

Just impressions from the odd stories I've seen in this newsgroup recently.

Cloning of signatures? Sorry, that's a concept I'm not sure I can grasp.

I'm contrasting two things. On the one hand you steal Mrs Judith Smith's card which she has already signed, and you practice signing her name in her handwriting until you reckon you've perfected it enough to fool one of the new generation of with-it checkout chicks. This is the option I called "difficult" (for the thief). On the other hand, you borrow Mrs Smith's card for the purpose of copying (carefully avoiding the clone word) the magstripe details onto a blank card with a blank sig strip. You then emboss Mrs Smith's name on the front (or Mr Smith's if you're a man) and sign her (his) name on the back *in your own* handwriting. This is the "easy" option because it doesn't involve signature practicing, since once under the watchful eye of the checkout chick you can calmly render your own version of the Smith signature without so much as even one pearl of sweat forming on your furrowed brow to give the game away.

Both methods involve presenting "fake" signatures. One because it tries to resemble the original, and gets close, but isn't of course genuine, the other because it isn't genuine either even though it will resemble most excellently the equally fake signaure on the actual dodgy card.

I think "cloning" is the wrong name for this. Isn't a clone of something supposed to mean something which is in every way an exact copy of whatever it's trying to pretend to be? In that case, I don't see how you can consider the signature cloned if it doesn't even remotely resemble the signature the original card has on it, but is merely a signature which purports to be the victim's name but which is in fact in my handwriting.

There can't have been enough sackings, then. Lessons haven't been tacught as they should. OK, employment law probably means you can't sack'em, but you can demote them to shelf-stackers or something.

In other words, the loss is affordable. So why all the fuss now? Evidently fraud isn't a big enough problem to lose sleep over.

At 21:38:25 on 19/01/2006, john boyle delighted uk.finance by announcing:

When does it expire?

"Mike Scott" wrote

... OK ...

"Mike Scott" wrote

That's just your (misguided) opinion, though, isn't it?

There's been no change in the law on liability, nor in the Banking Code, to place liability on the customer rather than the bank - has there?

So why do you think that the "burden" will be shifted at all?

"Mike Scott" wrote

Perhaps rather "depending on your misguided pre-conceptions"??

It's bleedin' obvious! In a disputed transaction where the correct PIN has been used, that fact will be asserted by the banks to constitute irrefutable evidence that the transaction was either authorised by the customer or that the customer "must have" disclosed the PIN to someone else either deliberately or negligently, contrary to the agreed Ts&Cs.

Although this evidence is in fact not irrefutable, it is nevertheless good prima facie evidence, which the customer, even if innocent, may be hard-pressed successfully to refute.

It may often (but not necessarily always) be easy to prove alibi, so that personal authorisation cannot have been given, but the scunner is that it's virtually impossible to prove that gross negligence was not involved in however knowledge of the PIN came to the perpetrator. And of course the "just a lucky guess" defence is bound to fail the "balance of probability" test, is it not?

"Ronald Raygun" wrote

Let them try to prove it!

"Ronald Raygun" wrote

Are you forgetting that the Banking Code requires the *bank* to prove gross negligence, not for the *customer* to prove the lack of it?

In message , Alex writes

(And NO, I'm not telling you the number ! :-)