Two people described the same financial scam to both the police and their banks over the past year. The only difference was where they lived — one in Canada, the other in the U.K.
And that determined what happened next.
Asif Mohammed lost $7,200 this spring and never got it all back. Meanwhile, Samantha Bradshaw was out £11,000 (nearly $21,000 Cdn) but her financial institution reimbursed the money within days.
That’s because British banks are required by law to make most of their customers whole when money is lost to a scam, often returning the sum within days of making a claim. In contrast, Canadian banks have no such legal obligation, leaving scam victims here largely unprotected.
As CBC’s Marketplace found out, it also means British banks are incentivized to crack down on fraudsters in a way Canadian banks are not.
David Common confronts a bank scammer who lures victims by pretending to be the fraud department at their financial institution.
‘I’ve made a big mistake’
Toronto-based Mohammed was working on a major engineering project when he received a call that appeared to be coming from his bank, Tangerine.
The caller identified herself as a representative from Tangerine’s fraud investigations department and told him there had been multiple attempts to use his debit card at a Best Buy in Edmonton.
Mohammed explained the charges weren’t his, and was told his card needed to be collected as evidence. The caller said Mohammed’s case had been transferred to Toronto police, who sent a courier to his worksite. He handed over the debit card to this “courier” but says he didn’t provide the PIN.
Minutes later, his wife, Salwa Sultana, texted him to say money had disappeared from the account — $1,200 to be exact.
“At that point, I realized that I’ve made a big mistake,” Mohammed said.
The couple reported what happened to the real Tangerine but were told they would be on the hook for the losses.
Samantha Bradshaw tells Marketplace’s David Common about her experience as a victim of a bank impersonation scam.
Samantha Bradshaw received a near-identical call at her home in England’s East Midlands last fall that lasted four hours.
She was also told multiple cards had been compromised. A courier came to pick them up and scammers then used her cards to make purchases.
More worrying for Bradshaw, the scammers knew where she lived. She told Marketplace she called the police and the emergency operator instructed her to lock her doors.
“‘Make sure everybody is safe,'” Bradshaw said she was told. “And then it was real panic, real crying, real horrible emotions coming through. My trust was completely gone.”
Yet within days, Bradshaw’s bank called to tell her the entire loss was covered, under Britain’s reimbursement rules.
After months of pleading with Tangerine, Asif Mohammed and Salwa Sultana reached a settlement with the bank. While they aren’t able to tell CBC News about the details, it does not cover their entire loss.
Tangerine wouldn’t comment on this particular case but said they use “fraud monitoring, security controls, client education… to identify and help prevent unusual account activity.”
Multiple major police services across Canada have issued public warnings saying they would never send a courier to collect debit or credit cards.
Does reimbursement slow scams — or supercharge scammers?
Shifting the burden of responsibility from customer to bank is a recognition that financial institutions are better able to identify and stop scams, says Andrei Skorobogatov, a strategic advisor of Britain’s regulations.
Andrei Skorobogatov helped advise on the reimbursement rules in the U.K. and now works with the Global Anti-Scam Alliance. (Nelisha Vellani/CBC)
Skorobogatov, who works with the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, believes all countries have the responsibility to act.
“The public going about their day-to-day business will probably struggle to be able to detect [a scam] in a way that the bank with their highly sophisticated detection mechanisms are in a much better place to do,” he said.
Britain’s third-largest bank agrees. Since the introduction of bank liability two years ago, Santander has introduced new measures to flag suspicious transactions and rapidly intervene when customers appear to be sending money to an unknown contact.
The new regulations have “pushed financial institutions,” Chris Ainsley, head of fraud risk management at Santander, told Marketplace during a visit to the U.K. headquarters. “That’s now a signal for us to take extra action to prevent more fraud and stop more at source.”
Global anti-fraud groups track the multibillion-dollar scam industry, which has become extremely lucrative for individual fraudsters. One scammer, who identifies himself with the name “Cameron,” told Marketplace he makes up to £5,000 ($9,400 Cdn) from each victim.
CBC Marketplace confronted this bank impersonation scammer about his role in stealing money from victims. (CBC)
He displayed no sympathy for those victims in a video call with Marketplace, in which he used a mask and sunglasses to conceal his face. He believes U.K. reimbursement rules mean that only the banks end up paying for his crimes.
In fact, banks recoup their losses through fees collected from all customers. Victims of these crimes may get their money back but often feel a deep loss of trust and embarrassment.
British banks are taking action to prevent scams. For instance, Santander uses machine learning to identify suspicious transactions, based on hundreds of thousands of past scams. The bank will message or call customers in real time, trying to “break the spell that the fraudsters put them under,” Ainsley said.
The intervention on red-flagged transactions can sometimes delay legitimate transactions. But the vast majority of bank transfers in the U.K. still take less than 10 seconds, compared to multiple days in Canada.
If money is transferred to scammers, the British rules dictate that the sending bank and receiving banks are each responsible for half of the reimbursement to the customer who was scammed — except in cases of extreme negligence.
Will Canada follow Britain’s lead?
Marketplace asked Canada’s finance minister directly if he was considering forcing Canadian banks to reimburse scammed customers.
Canada’s Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne says the government is working to better protect Canadians but didn’t commit to reimbursement. (Nelisha Vellani/CBC)
François-Philippe Champagne detailed a number of new efforts, including the introduction of Bill C-29, an act to establish the Financial Crimes Agency earlier this year, but stopped short of committing to liability for financial institutions.
“I would say we need to consult. There’s many actors. There’s the telecoms, there’s the banks, there’s other people in that ecosystem.”
Champagne says specially trained federal officers have been deployed in an effort to arrest those responsible and prevent fraud in the first place.
“We put boots on the ground,” he said. “I have officers who are embedded with the police force — for example, in Surrey, some regions in Ontario. And that has been the most effective thing because… it’s about following the money.”
