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Comment by csense | Hacker News Reader

> In October, the U.K. began requiring banks to reimburse scam victims up to £85,000, or about $116,000, per claim when they make a fraudulent payment on behalf of their customers, even if the customers authorized the transfer.

How does the bank verify the scammer and the "victim" aren't colluding?

I.e. Mal opens a bank account with $100k, it gets cleaned out when he's "scammed" by Eve, then Mal is reimbursed $100k. Mal & Eve collectively start with $100k, and end up with $200k.

(This is why I put "victim" in quotes: In this scenario, Eve and Mal are co-conspirators trying to defraud the scam reimbursement system.)

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They’re pretty on-the-ball with fraud. People are commonly scammed into being a money mule (basically being sent money and then being asked to send it on to another account, with the promise of payment) and they get locked out.

They’re not going to just take your word at being scammed, either, and the police are going to be involved for it to even get off the ground.

To add to that - there are several barriers to taking out large amounts of cash. You can’t just walk into a bank and pull out £10k, no questions asked, because of the likelihood of it being part of a scam.

Yeah, but the scammer could also just walk into the bank and pass the teller a note telling them to hand over all the money in the drawer. They'd do it! But it would be theft and the scammer would be arrested, just like if they did what you're suggesting.

It's cute if you really think that

These days you can open bank accounts completely online with fraudulent info

You can even open bank accounts from countries on the other side of the world. How will they arrest you, exactly?

It's on the bank to prevent those other-side-of-the-world account holders from sending large sums of money to untrusted destinations in the first place.

Good luck with that. Contracts etc can be falsified. You'd just end up locking out real people from sending their own money for legitimate reasons in the name of attempting to stop fraud or in your words "untrusted destinations" whatever that means.

They won't "reimburse scam victims" on the other side of the world. They are probably reluctant to reimburse at all unless you are some granny in Croydon making a fuss in the newspapers.

Like the real scams, this does require that Mal be overseas in some place where they can't easily be traced. And of course if the money ever comes back to Eve's bank account, someone might notice. So this requires quite a complicated setup which is hard to achieve between people in different countries because .. one might scam the other.

Even if the customer authorized the transaction? So now all the customers have to pay higher fees to cover for idiots getting scammed. Is the Bank of England going to start refunding people who get scammed out of cash under the mattress?

The reimbursing thing is quite new and at least one of the parties has to be UK resident to get UK compensation. That would leave the UK resident at risk of jail. Usually the scammers like to be somewhere well offshore.

https://xkcd.com/1494/

But in practice it's not like that. Roofing scams recently destabilized the entire homeowners insurance market in Florida https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/roofing-scams-florida-p...

Ummm, am I the only one who thinks if it was not an authorized payment, I expect 100% recompense, not limited to £85k.

Fwiw the word “colluding” already describes why victim was emphasized.

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