Purse Ho
Seniors lose more than $ 600 million a year to fraud, according to the Federal Trade Commission. It is shocking and heartbreaking.
But what also pisses me off is when banks turn a blind eye to such activity, allowing money transfers when it should be obvious that something wrong is happening.
Lisa Spanierman contacted me recently to tell me how her 81-year-old mother had over $ 600,000 stolen and how Chase Bank did little to prevent the theft of many of her assets. savings.
“It’s mind-numbing,” said Spanierman, 53, a consulting professor at Arizona State University. “I can almost understand the first time the bank authorized one of these wire transfers. But when it happens over and over again, it’s just amazing.
He is. And that’s not unique to Chase. I have heard from a number of people over the years about similar incidents involving elderly parents and other big banks.
In each case, the bank approves what many observers would likely consider a suspicious transaction, and then washes its hands of the problem.
“Chase told me they don’t question their customers,” Spanierman recalls. “But why not? What would it do to them to ask more questions and do something?”
She noted that in her three decades as a Chase client, her mother had never sent a wire transfer until last year, making a sudden surge of half a dozen such unusual to say the least. transactions within two weeks.
Spanierman also said her mother’s memory started to fade, which made it difficult for her to explain herself at times. A bank teller who insisted on getting details on wire transfers likely would have seen something wrong, Spanierman told me.
“There should have been a lot of red flags,” she said. “But the bank ignored them.”
Chase says bank employees followed all required procedures. More on that in a moment.
Spanierman told me that she struggled to put it all together because of her mother’s memory issues and her reluctance to discuss something that seems to have left her mother feeling humiliated.
As far as she can tell, however, Spanierman said it looked like her mother fell into a gift card scam last June, buying cards worth 2,500. $ for a fraudster. (As I wrote recently, almost all online gift card requests are bogus, although a lot of people fall for it.)
“The gift cards were apparently a test,” Spanierman said.
The very next day, she said, the fraudster was back with demands for Spanierman’s mother to invest in a hotel or restaurant in Thailand. It is not clear, she said, whether the requests were presented as an opportunity or if some sort of threat was involved.
“He took control of my mom’s computer, probably making her download malware,” Spanierman said. “He saw that she had over $ 600,000 in her checking account.”
These were inheritance funds and life insurance related to the death of her husband, Spanierman’s stepfather, who died of a brain hemorrhage a year ago.
Regardless of how the scammer motivated Spanierman’s mother, bank records show she visited a Chase branch on New York’s East Side and wired $ 45,000 to an address in Bangkok, Thailand. She wired an additional $ 45,000 from the same branch four days later.
Two days later, she wired $ 300,000 from another Chase branch. She then returned the same day to the first branch and attempted to wire an additional $ 200,000. Although the transaction was approved, it did not go through for some reason.
A week later, Spanierman’s mother arrived at another Chase branch and again attempted to wire $ 200,000. This time – finally – a cashier was suspicious and refused to send the money.
So Spanierman’s mother returned to the first branch the same day and successfully transferred $ 231,000 to Bangkok.
Spanierman said the scammer apparently asked his mother to keep in touch with him by phone with every wire transfer. This is a common ploy that not only prevents the victim from calling the police or their relatives, but also keeps the con artist in the driver’s seat, allowing them to listen and give further instructions if necessary.
As she told me all about this, Spanierman said she was amazed that out of half a dozen wire transfers, only one Chase employee recognized something was wrong and put an end to things.
Everyone else apparently had no qualms about allowing an elderly client to move huge sums of money overseas – something she had never done before in her 30 years as a Chase client. .
Worse yet, even though a cashier spotted seemingly suspicious activity, there was apparently nothing in Chase’s system that flagged other employee accounts.
Think about it: in an agency, a wire transfer was refused. But on the same day, an even larger transaction – $ 231,000 – was authorized. How is it possible?
Chase didn’t have much to say about it.
“We know it is difficult for customers and their families,” admitted Christina Dello Buono, spokesperson for the bank.
“This is why we urge customers to look for common scams that include unusual requests to send money to accounts here or abroad to people they may or may not know,” he said. she declared, placing the burden of responsibility. clients rather than the companies that are the custodians of their money.
Dello Buono added that Chase employees are trained “to gather information and ask questions about electronic transactions,” and that these procedures were followed with Spanierman’s mother.
But that was obviously not enough, as the loss of over $ 600,000 through multiple transactions easily attests.
Spanierman said he was told his mother’s money was missing and wire transfers could not be recovered. She accepts that ultimately her mother is to blame for being duped.
Nonetheless, Spanierman filed a lawsuit with Chase seeking at least partial return of the lost funds, based on the bank’s apparent reluctance to prevent the fraud. She also contacted me to shine the spotlight on the subject.
“Any bank employee who took a minute to ask a few questions would have concluded that this was a scam,” she said. “But in almost all cases, they didn’t. They just helped clear his account.
This stuff happens too frequently to be ignored as live and learning scenarios. If banks are unable to implement guarantees to protect customers, especially elderly customers, then lawmakers or financial regulators must step in.
There should be rules that make it easier for banks to intervene in cases of suspicious activity – rules that protect banks from liability for blocking certain transactions while ensuring that customers are not abused.
If such precautions end up slowing down some valid wire transfers, well, maybe that’s the price to pay for allowing crooks so much access to the banking system.
Saying that you just honor your customer’s wishes isn’t enough, not with annual losses that run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Spanierman told me that Chase called her this week to tell her that she was still studying her mother’s situation. But she said the bank had not indicated it would offer a restitution or implement any changes.
“It appears they are not interested in understanding the failure of the procedure,” Spanierman said.
I guess Chase knows very well how his system is dropping customers. They just don’t do anything about it.