You’ve been scammed – what you need to do now
Hopefully this isn’t you, but if your stomach has just dropped through the floor, you know how the people who’ve been scammed out of £207.5m in the first half of 2019 feel. If you could tear yourself away from Brexit updates, this is the figure the media (including the Guardian, BBC and the Evening Standard) was getting excited about and has been reporting on over the past few days.
For those of you not imaginative enough to um, imagine, what £207.5m means, you could buy the flat, One Hyde Park, that Nick Candy sold last year and get change, or the Rangyai Island in Thailand and get even more change, or the Seven Seas yacht and still get change, or 41,500,000 tins of Quality Street (no change).
And this is only a certain type of fraud – so-called APP fraud – Authorised Push Payment fraud. This is where the fraudster may pose as your bank or someone you think you have a relationship with online, and they convince you to authorise a payment out of your account because they maybe say your account has been compromised, or they create a totally credible story playing on a foundation of trust they’ve cultivated and enough personal details they’ve phished to sound convincing.
Unfortunately…
… not all the baddies in life wear the costumes we imagine them to be in,
and life’s actions don’t always come with the H&S warning signs we are so used to seeing we ignore and click away anyway.
But it can have devastating effects and it only takes a clever fraudster and a moment of letting your vigilance slip for life to change.
APP fraud also includes emails being intercepted and, for example, account details being changed on invoices to the fraudsters’ own account; the fraudster then kindly forwards on the invoice to its intended recipient. The payer dutifully pays their bill to the account quoted in the amended invoice – leaving the customer and the business unfairly out of pocket – two innocent victims.
People have had their dream homes snatched from them as Joe Sinclair at the FT reported in July this year, been duped into transferring their life savings (or at least a meaningful life changing amount) to the not-so-friendly fraudster who is presumably living the highlife in number One Hyde Park, or on their yacht somewhere on the Seven Seas munching their way through a LOT of Quality Street.
Some banks have signed up to a voluntary code where if the innocent victim can show they took reasonable measures to be diligent (what happened to innocent until proven guilty?!) their bank will reimburse them in the event of this kind of fraud.
If you’ve attempted to make a payment to someone new lately, you may have been subjected to a barrage of questions by your bank as to how you know the person and have you checked their bank account details – this voluntary code is probably why.
Also, coming down the track, is a checking system you may have read about in the media called Confirmation of Payee. This is where your bank will tell you if the name of the person you think you’re paying is the roughly the same as the person they have opened a bank account for (I know, unbelievably this check isn’t done at the moment, you could say the payment’s for Minnie Mouse on the Moon and your payment would still go through). But that’s going to have all sorts of issues around near matches, and it isn’t due to roll out until maybe March 2020. At the rate of £207.5m per half year, that’s people losing nearly the same amount all over again before anything’s done.
But….
Never fear, Ordo is here. Or it will be. We’re busy building it right now.
Ordo will be the shiny new way which will allow people and businesses, when they’re owed money, to send their requests for payment (we call them smart requests) securely to their customers, friends and family so that they get an instant notification on their phone (or tablet or computer) that they’ve been sent a smart request for payment. No one needs to share bank account details, and wiithin a few clicks, the customer, friend, family member – any payer, can simply, swiftly and securely see who’s asking them pay, how much, by when, and choose when and if to pay, directly from their own bank account. The biller does this all without the fear of being hacked, can attach invoices or a video of the gig you bought the tickets for, and the payer can receive and manage all their bills and payments from their smart device of choice, available 24×7, without needing to look up account details or references: at last, a service enabling people to deal with their payments on the go, just like juggling everything else….or when you get home with a cup of tea, we’re flexible like that.
How do we do all this? Ordo is end-to-end encrypted across our own super secure platform, safe from hackers and fraudsters. We’ve put our users, billers and payers, of all shapes and sizes at the heart of Ordo and put them in complete control of their own finances.
So relax, there’ll soon be a new smarter way to pay and be paid, without the worry of whether the Universe thinks it’s just your turn to fall for that scam or not. Get your increased financial wellbeing at Ordo.
Why should the fraudsters have your hard-earned cash? You deserve all the Quality Street you can eat (and more). Safe in the knowledge that your dentist can send you a smart request for your filings, with both of you certain you’re paying the right person. That makes us at Ordo feel like this:
If you want to talk, drop us a line at info@ordohq.com
We’d love to hear from you. We also love Quality Street. And tea.