> I'm guessing they receive a high volume of support requests and are understaffed.
No, the reason is that there's no penalty for the behavior you just witnessed, so it's more profitable to stonewall victims in hopes they go away, and only refund when the authority actually forces them to, which only happens in a small percentage of cases where the fraud victim actually escalates their complaint to the relevant authority.
Imagine if shoplifting by the common man was treated the same way - you can shoplift all you want and the worst-case scenario is that you'll have to give the goods back if the police actually catches you.
> "I think the point is that there is no indication of a crime."
Inexplicably being denied access to your own funds without being told what's going on or when the issue will be resolved could be an indication of a crime. I'm not saying it is a clear indication, but I'm not denying the possibility either.
There can be any number of hypothetical reasons for the situation being the way it is, and you can't exclude ones which are clearly criminal in nature (say somebody hacked their account and emptied it for funds). You should also draw parallels to other service providers (hospitals, universities, etc).
> "It's so easy to react emotionally to things when they affect your livelihood"
What other choice do you have in such a situation? This person exhausted every option they had, only to eventually get the help they needed by randomly reaching out to internet strangers. If it wasn't for this, who knows how long they would remain locked out of their account without any visibility into what's going on? Meanwhile, their business would be hurting, creating a cascading effect.
Filing a police report in such a situation isn't "reacting emotionally".
> It is an immense failure of law enforcement to not crack down harder on widespread scams.
I fully agree. My identity was stolen and used to sign up for retail credit cards in a spree, and I even did the research for them. I had a timestamp of purchase, the items purchased, and the cash register number. The police could not care less. For one, they are lazy as hell and throw up jurisdictions as an excuse. The mere fact that the thief seemingly only used one store per jurisdiction seemed almost intentional in terms of taking advantage of this. The total amount stolen was $9,000, but I don't think the police gave it a second thought after I contacted them, and this was in a city big enough that had a financial crimes department.
> because he may be ripping people off or people may file claims for a refund
This is a reasonable argument in general, but it falls apart here because there was a human in the loop who knows why the account was disabled, and knows that it wasn’t for suspicion of scammy behavior, nor for suspicion of insufficient funds.
> So if you appear to be more dodgy than the account opened by whomever defrauded you, you're just out of luck? And that's a sensible outcome?
Why twist things to fit race or other prejudices. I had no prejudices in comment.
What I meant is: You file a police report and bring it to the bank, Bank asks other account holder to freeze assets for this transaction while investigation proceeds.
If multiple people do the same with the same target account then it becomes easier to prove malfeasance.
Objective facts/investigation.
Nowhere does race or anything come in... (hard for me to comprehend this issue that usa has btw)
> Envision this scenario - you are walking down the street, get jumped, your attackers force to you transfer a decent sum to them, authenticating the transaction using your bank...
I have been jumped, I have gone to the police, they were very helpful, rode around with them and they got list of cameras in area, they showed a list of usual suspects, next day the guy was under arrest and I got my phone back. They did manage to guess pin and attempt to make transactions, i did get refunds from bank since i called on way to police.(not that they could get more then 150e without 2fa hardware token)
You are being very negative for no reason and make wild assumptions.
You will get support.
Unless the contrary actually happened to you then please excuse my skepticism
And before you say 'privilege', I'm not special in any way where I live.
> But it doesn't happen enough for it to be worth setting up an entire bureaucracy to prevent it
But perhaps it would happen vastly more if that bureaucracy wasn't trying to prevent? I don't know, but I suspect there are an awful lot of people who would commit fraud if they thought they'd get away with it.
> and am again out $1000, but this time as a result of my bank's incompetence
> If the onus for verifying your identity were on institutions
Your two situations are really the same situation.
1. You give your money to another party, and then claim they committed fraud. You can't just instantly seize $1000 from them; you must prove that they committed fraud.
2. You give your money to another party to manage, and then claim they breached contract. You can't just instantly seize $1000 from them; you must prove they violated the contract.
In both cases, the legal onus is on the accuser to demonstrate criminal activity ("innocent until proven guilty"). Otherwise, you could walk around claiming people and banks owe you money and simply be presumed correct.
(Also, in both cases, it would be have been better for you to not to trust those particular parties.)
> The police, along with bank employees, generally aren't great at simultaneously entertaining multiple possibilities.
Are you basing this on something other then assumptions?
If you go to the police and say you are a victim of fraud they will help, how it happened is secondary.
Why so little faith in authorities?
> You have blown up this thread asserting the complete equivalence of two things
What I did say is police should help you if you are a victim, how it happened is secondary. That is on top of saying checks are a lot more insecure and its a lot more difficult if not impossible to fall victim with alternatives.
> stop trying to gaslight those of us who can not
You can enjoy the alternatives, just search for them. (one of the banks I'm using is revolut which is in the usa too and easy to set up on your phone...)
As for gaslighting... That's just incredulity towards dismissiveness... If it seems like bad faith, it's not, surprised it would be interpreted as such so I'll stop.
> What annoys me about this is that the extra payment does not appear to have been decided based on losses, but more punitive
How are you going to deter fraud if the only penalty is a reimbursement of the stolen money? That incentivizes everyone to commit fraud because the penalty would be to go back to status quo ante. You'd be a sucker not to commit fraud.
> Will the police help you when you call them to report it? I highly, HIGHLY doubt it
With honest-services and securities fraud, the police are generally there to document, not enforce. If someone stole your WoW gold and you sued, you'd almost certainly have a case. If I were your lawyer (I'm not a lawyer), I'd send a letter to the relevant tax authorities and attorneys general, as a point of leverage during settlement talks. (This is not uncommon in lawsuits--
TL; DR No, one does not always get caught. I won't say I've always been faithful to every city's open-carry alcohol laws. But when you break such laws (a) it's still breaking the law which (b) exposes you to more than just the government.
> So like forgive me if I think it's a waste of tax money for Bharara and the courts and the police to go after Big Vern, while the Equifax guys are not pre-emptively detained while a fine is calculated
You're forgiven for having an opinion? I still disagree. We know there was criminal conduct on behalf of Big Vern. Not yet Equifax. Though on a higher level I agree, since ordinary people were harmed by Equifax. My sympathies for people who lose money in Bitcoin fraud is less, though I think that's a function of familiarity with the system.
> what if they refuse to work? Do they just get to walk away?
Nope. Then you can send them to prison. But at least give them a choice.
> people who commit things like large-scale fraud are usually psychopaths to some degree
Large scale fraud is rare. You want to send those people to prison, fine, but it'll be in the hundreds on an annual basis.
Small scale fraud is common. The motivation here is purely financial. They will want to keep out of jail and pay you money. It makes no sense to spend money to keep these people unproductive in prison. In fact, it's just outright crazy.
> pressing criminal charges for any wrongdoing is off
Well, first of all, that's not what's happening here. But, er, why do you think it shouldn't prosecuted? Much more minor fraud than this is routinely prosecuted.
What I don't understand is... where the hell are the police on this stuff? Checking account fraud is ridiculously easy to pull off - if you know an account number, you can steal an arbitrary amount of money from a checking account. Why isn't it more common? Because the U.S. treasury department comes down like the wrath of God on people they catch doing it. Of course scammers are trying to set up scams and take advantage of people in various clever ways. We're _supposed_ to have police who make things very, very unpleasant for the people who do so, but as far as I can tell, they don't even care.
> Though they weren’t gracious enough to let the person withdraw their funds in the end
You know this is a crime, right? I mean, everyone's international and anonymous so it has the same relationship to law enforcement as a backstreet dice game, but they did actually defraud this guy.
> it’s easier to just get over it as quickly as possible. None of this will amount to anything, and you’ll feel awful until you give up
You don't write to your A. G. to get your money back. (You won't.) You do as an act of civic service.
These people will defraud again. Their investors will back people who will defraud again. Putting people in jail doesn't get anyone's money back. But it deters the next fraud.
Write the letter, send the evidence, write off the loss and then move on.
> While this was going on, we got an email from their sales rep, congratulating us for increasing our spend by more than 8000% and wanted to have a chat. So I guess they do have the systems to monitor unusual patterns, they just turn a blind eye.
At this point we're entering criminal territory. Enriching yourself when you should reasonably know something criminal is occurring (like someone being defrauded), and helping the perpetrator by providing your service anyways, can make you a criminal yourself very fast.
As far as judges will be concerned, you're now a perp yourself.
>>At the end of the day, peoples' complaint about the financial prosecutions mentioned in the article is this: not enough people went to jail.
Not only that, but also the fact that the fees they paid were a drop in the bucket compared to the profit they made from the practices they were found guilty of.
It's the literal equivalent of a thief stealing $100 and being fined $5 for the crime. He gets to keep most of the money, which of course provides an excellent incentive to keep stealing.
> how do you feel about getting locked out of all your money for a false-positive fraud detection?
I don't feel bad about it - it happened once or twice in the last 30 years and it was relatively trivial to fix[1]. I also don't mind that they freeze spending if they think my account was hijacked in any way.
[1] Go into a branch with my ID, look at the transactions they think is fraud, declare that they are not, and get my account unfrozen. The whole process took about 60m, from leaving my front door to withdrawing money again.
No, the reason is that there's no penalty for the behavior you just witnessed, so it's more profitable to stonewall victims in hopes they go away, and only refund when the authority actually forces them to, which only happens in a small percentage of cases where the fraud victim actually escalates their complaint to the relevant authority.
Imagine if shoplifting by the common man was treated the same way - you can shoplift all you want and the worst-case scenario is that you'll have to give the goods back if the police actually catches you.
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