For the first six months of the coronavirus pandemic, an incredible thing happened. All around the world people started looking out for each other. From ad hoc orchestras playing music while perched on various Italian window ledges to wine drop-offs in urban centres, we saw people move (albeit temporarily) from being me-centric, to being we-centric.
Obviously, things got a little bit crazy thereafter and that unity turned into division. Notwithstanding the rabbit hole all of us (OK, some of us) descended down, for a brief moment in time it really felt like as a society we had cracked the code on what it means to live with each other in a spirit of fraternality.
I’ve been thinking about that brief move towards thinking of others and not merely as a chance to blame someone else for life’s problems. I’ve been cogitating on that short-lived but refreshing societal shift in the context of what is another pandemic occurring in our society.
The pandemic I speak of is also airborne, but in this case, it is borne through the airwaves, radio channels, telephone networks and internet communication networks. I’m referring to the pandemic of financial scams that seem, if you believe the newspapers, to be happening on an almost daily basis.
Just the other day I read of a couple of individuals who had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars to these scams. In this case, the individuals were in the media suggesting that their bank, which transferred these customers’ money out of their accounts at their request, should somehow be held liable for them falling victim to a scam and accordingly should refund the lost money.
Now I don’t want to receive a barrage of hate mail from people saying that I have no empathy. I can only imagine how horrific it must feel; that sinking feeling when one realises one has been scammed. To face the realisation that one has lost one’s family’s entire life saving to some dodgy scam must be next-level horrific. I feel nothing but immense sympathy for those who have fallen victim to the scams and my heart goes out to those individuals.
But, and yes, there is always a but, I can’t agree that somehow we should blame the banks for people falling for these scams. I have never had the misfortune to be caught out by these nefarious actors and I would, I’m sure, feel absolute fury if I were to be. I’m sure I’d be looking around for someone or something to blame.
But the reality is, banks try incredibly hard to warn people of these scams. Transferring big sums of money using Internet banking is a laborious process and isn’t something that people can do on a whim without giving it much thought. With most Internet banking platforms (and, indeed, the one from the bank in this example) setting up large Internet transfers is a complex and convoluted process with multiple steps at which customers are questioned whether they really want to perform that transaction. As the bank responded when questioned about this particular example:
[the bank] is defending its refusal to pay out, saying it was acting on the customers’ express instructions when it transferred the money to scammers and therefore has no liability for their loss.
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These individuals have escalated their issue, calling in the banking ombudsman and going to the media to try and create some leverage. And, while gaining media attention is an understandable leverage point, I don’t think it’ll prove particularly effective. Authorities believe that hundreds of millions of dollars are being scammed out of New Zealanders every year, and that figure looks only set to rise as scammers get even more sophisticated. That’s a huge liability in the event that there is no option for the banks to get the money back.
Banks refunding that money of their own account would also seem to open the floodgates to more successful scams as banking customers, comfortable that they’ll be made right in the event that anything goes wrong, loosen their focus on keeping themselves and their hard-earned cash safe.
It’s a horrendous situation and I’m not blaming the victims of the scams here. But at the same time, I think it’s wrong to expect the banks to make customers good when they have simply followed those same customers’ instructions.
