With Coronavirus still spreading further and faster, is compensation after an event really better than focussing on stopping harm in the first place?
In October 2019, we blogged about how more and more people are being scammed out of their hard-earned income. In half of 2018 alone, UK consumers and businesses were duped out of £200m – or 41,500,000 tins of quality street (for those that measure by chocolate) by scammers persuading customers to make payments to fraudulent accounts.
The banks were encouraged by regulators to enter into a Code of Conduct to regulate how they treat their customers, and to have a fund out of which they would reimburse innocent victims of this growing fraud – they call it the Contingent Reimbursement.
Great, job done.
Not so fast….
We said that we’d seen an increase in the scary warnings that appear, both written and verbal, when you go to make a bank transfer, and especially if you’re trying to set up a payment to someone new.
Which? recently looked at how this is all working for consumers, and it seems all is not well. Banks appear to be trying to shift responsibility onto their customers for covering these bank transfer scams.
We ascribe to the “innocent until proven guilty” principle alongside, in an increasingly digital world, everyone needs to take responsibility for being sensible and taking reasonable precautions…after all, you wouldn’t leave your house without locking your door, or get on your bicycle without putting on your bicycle helmet – the same goes for our online world, and we’ve all got to look after our passwords and security codes.
The problem comes when you have sophisticated hackers and scam artists whose full-time job is to trick innocent people out of their money – they’ve gotten pretty darn good at it. They’ve honed their sneaky and malicious core skills and put them together with some clever algorithms in their toolkit…so is it really right for customers to be blamed when they’re distracted that one time and not completely concentrating on being on guard when they fall victim to these diligent professionals? Nobody should have to justify their innocence in the face of being a victim of fraud, nor have to struggle for assistance in the, often, devastating aftermath.
At Ordo, your money matters to us, and we think prevention is better than cure, especially as it turns out that Contingent Reimbursement is not the grooviest thing or the perfect dream and is actually proving quite limited. So we’ve built Ordo to stop you transferring money to the wrong person in the first place, rather than scrambling to recover lost money once it’s probably gone for good, and to no good end.
With Ordo, no one’s bank account details or security information are shared or visible to the other party, payers don’t need to mess about inputting the bank account details of the person they’re trying to pay, and we show every payer who it is they’re going to be transferring money to before they hit send, so they can be 100% certain they’re paying the right person for the right reason every time.
Ordo is simple, swift and secure; there’s no need to worry about your details or your money ending up in the wrong place, so there’s no need to stress about having to try and claim compensation and whether you’ll be believed by your bank or not…you’re safe with Ordo, and we’re sticking with the “innocent until proven guilty” thing.
Prevention is better than cure. If you want to protect, prevent fraud and be pro-active about your cash, Ordo is the way forward for you. Ordo is end-to-end encrypted across our own super secure platform, safe from hackers and fraudsters; we’re also regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (the FCA). 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.
We’re in live pilot right now; sign up to make sure you’re first to hear when we’re open for the business of keeping everyone and their money safe from fraudsters – whether you’re a small business, large corporate, public sector, charity or individual…we’ll be there for you.
If you want to talk, drop us a line at info@ordohq.com – we’d love to hear from you.