CycleChat Investigates - J. Arthur Rank

[ClichéGuevara]

Long story short. One of the mortgages I had included an endowment, which meant I received compensation due to them failing to deliver.

I was invited in to the bank to discuss it, and this patronising employee proceeded to talk down to me. He seemed quite put out when I asked why I should take any notice of his 'advice' given I was there as a consequence of the massive failure of his peers, which I had got round in my own way anyhow.

 

[gbb]

The endowment thing is really simple in my mind, it's a 50/50 gamble, will the markets do well and you come out even or on top, or will the markets perform poorly...you lose.
I did the endowment thing mainly because at the time, even with a modest house, it really was all I could afford.
And it started to fail almost within 2 years and the continued to do so. I bailed and got a proper mortgage, the bonus was I effectively got my money back when I cashed in the endowment so lived free for 3 years..

It wa always dependent on the markets doing well, any sensible person should realise it's a gamble, you may win, you may not.

 

[Drago]

I got compo for endowment miss-selling - being the sad mofo I am I kept everything, every last scrap of paper, so even 2 decades on it was easy to prove.

I must stress that was for miss-selling, not because It didn't perform as expected and I was unhappy in that regard.

 

[Pale Rider]

The OP's grasp of rhyming slang is less than firm.

'Fish tank' is the correct term for a bank, or less commonly 'the jod', derived from Jodrell Bank.

 

[Deleted member 26715]

The OP's grasp of rhyming slang is less than firm.

'Fish tank' is the correct term for a bank, or less commonly 'the jod', derived from Jodrell Bank.

I always thought it was Barclays, as in Barclays Bankers?

 

[ClichéGuevara]

The OP's grasp of rhyming slang is less than firm.

'Fish tank' is the correct term for a bank, or less commonly 'the jod', derived from Jodrell Bank.

I've never got my head around using a longer, more confusing phrase to represent something else. Then again, it seems to stem from people that pride themselves in being 'cockney' which has it's origins in 'cocks egg' referring to a small defective egg.

 

[Deleted member 26715]

I've never got my head around using a longer, more confusing phrase to represent something else. Then again, it seems to stem from people that pride themselves in being 'cockney' which has it's origins in 'cocks egg' referring to a small defective egg.

Is that no Cockerney squire?

 

[ClichéGuevara]

Is that no Cockerney squire?

I'm guessing that mean a 'tyre' in rhymingese.

 

[Edwardoka]

Ladies and gents, if I am ever caught trying to be serious your should seek immediate medical attention for me.

The nurse with the tranq dartgun is standing by in the Jurassic Park jeep.

As for the question, it depends. Fraud is a major issue.

Banks do all they can to alert people to scams, and they have systems in place that monitor every transaction for potentially fraudulent behaviour, but banks can't mitigate everything. There are many classes of attack, and they're getting more and more sophisticated.

Just the other day I got an email claiming to have taken over my PC and recorded compromising footage of me, threatening to send it to several of my Facebook Messenger contacts if I didn't hand over $1,000 in bitcoin. The proof that they had done so was that they had a now-ancient password of mine.

I know that they got my email address and that ancient password from the database of a hacked website.
(haveibeenpwned.com will tell you if your email address has been leaked via a website hack. Mine has, 7 times.) and as I don't re-use passwords, my PC doesn't have a webcam, my Facebook account was deactivated at the time of writing, and none of my devices can access any Facebook servers without me knowing, so even if they had taken over my PC they wouldn't be able to access my Facebook, I was fairly confident that they had nothing on me.

For the average person, however? Potentially enough to frighten them into paying, and if that person re-uses passwords, their entire life can legitimately be pulled apart with trivial ease. And a lot of people are running devices that haven't/can't be updated and which are several years behind the curve on security features and will have known exploits, and most are deeply incurious about the technology they use in their day to day lives.

Banks cannot be expected to bail out someone who reluctantly but knowingly hands over money to a scammer.
In the situation where an obviously fraudulent transaction goes through, it's on the banks, who purport to be experts in fraud prevention, to block it. If they don't, then they should be on the hook.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying:

• NEVER USE THE SAME PASSWORD ON DIFFERENT SITES
• KEEP YOUR DEVICES UP TO DATE
• ADD MULTI-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION ON EVERY WEBSITE THAT OFFERS IT

P.S. Also, banks should be broken up, because the psychopathic yahoos in investment banking are still gambling with YOUR money, despite being bailed out in 2008.

Edit 1: knew that they had nothing on me" to "fairly confident that they had nothing on me". A universal truth in information security is that pride comes before a fall.

Edit 2: It goes without saying that I knew they had no compromising footage of me because I would never do something compromising

 

[snorri]

On the one hand, why should banks refund people who've been foolish or negligent?

Isn't it HM Government who have been more "Foolish or negligent" than most lenders with Bounce Back Loan frauds apparently running at a high level?

 

[accountantpete]

My late Dad wanted an account with around £300 in so he could draw cash from the ATM whenever he liked and wasn't going to lose much if he lost the card etc. So the nice young man at Natwest set him up with a Silver Account - it cost £20 a month, mainly for privileges he was never going to use.

If you think banks are ethical in their quest to make money think again.

 

[Deleted member 26715]

I was working with a bank & the Met last year on a lot telephone fraud, one thing that has always puzzled me was why the banks lost the money, what I mean is if I was defrauded out of £10K, I put it into somebodies account, they then transfer it somewhere else, who transfers it somewhere else, until somebody actually goes into a bank & physically takes it out over the counter it's still in the system & logically retrievable

However they (the banks) claim it's not that simple, their claim is that that £10K would hit the account, then be split into 10x £1K transactions to other accounts, then each split into 10x £100 so there are now 100 transactions to chase, they then claim they will have people sat outside banks waiting to draw out the £100's. Seems a bit far fetched to me