When people get scammed and money is transferred out of their bank, why isn’t there a paper trail? If the money is transferred into some foreign country that won’t allow tracing, why not just exclude those countries from the banking system?
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A lot of them have victims purchase $500 gift cards for Target, Apple, Playstation Store, etc and then provide the scammer with the card number. Then it’s outside of the banking system. In theory the respective corporate fraud departments of each company could freeze the card numbers. But the victims probably didn’t realize that they were scammed until much later, so it isn’t being reported.
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https://m.youtube.com/c/ScammerPayback
This guy goes by Pierogi. He, and others like him, have made a career out of interfering with scammers. He explains how a lot of these scams work in the process. It’s wildly entertaining and also informative.
This is the reason most scammers try to get gift cards as payment. They are impossible to track and recover.
Scammers have two marks. The first is the person they scam and the second is the person they get to take the funds and withdraw them taking a small cut. As a lot of the world is in poverty this is very easy.
I recently had about 30 dollars taken from my debit mastercard account via 116 transactions all in little amounts.
I rang the bank and they refunded all the money straight away, as I had not used that account for anything but one payment to pay my psychologist, who use an entirely online payment system.
But I don’t understand their endgame because it went to a “merchant account” in Nigera which would make it easy for Mastercard to reverse the charges wouldn’t it? So how do the fraudsters get the money?
It’s not really banks so much as it is peer to peer money apps like cash app or Venmo to name a couple. And these apps are operating under the assumption that any money you send is money you agree to never be able to recover, it is basically the property of someone else once you hit send and nothing about it from a fraud protection standpoint is illegal since there was consent on the sending party..
This is where the issue lies is the consent. And the sad truth is the overwhelming majority of the victims are elderly. It’s not like this is a Visa card charge that you can dispute, it’s you sending someone money agreeing that that money belongs to them now.
Not sure if this is correct but I want to link this issue to basically how the entire banking system works and how without this type of “one way guaranteed”transactions global trade may not work. The only issue to not get your money back should always be when the victim completes a wire transfer. The laws around wire transfers are different than most baking transactions when it comes to recalling or trying to get your money back. If you don’t get the account owners authorization the bank has no recourse. Haven’t seen a fraudster that has that type of heart yet!
Have you ever wondered about the spam mails where you are offered a part-time clerical job? That’s searching for mules that are willing to receive money without asking where it comes from, and passing it on via WU or other anonymous means of transfer money.
Banks just need to allow people to utilize ‘positive pay’ – manually authorizing withdrawals from their account.
Recurring transactions can be “whitelisted”, transaction size limits can be imposed, daily limits can be imposed, geographical locations can be limited, etc etc.
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