Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

If your card is stolen and you become a victim of fraud, and they manage to take money from your account, and your bank already knows its fraud, there's no urgency on your end.

You'll get your money back. I'd go as far as saying that if the bank genuinely wants you to decide fast, it's not to protect you. It's to protect itself. Shenanigans about "do it fast or they'll take more" are bullshit always. The bank is on the hook, not you. So never do things in a rush, take your time to verify yourself that money indeed disappeared. There. is. no. urgency.

Sense of urgency is one of the best ways to make people do bad decisions. Salespeople use it, scammers use it. Nobody who is trying to be helpful will come with a story "that needs to be fixed now!!!".

If you still want to be safe, and you use a debit card, have 2 accounts. One with the bulk of your money without a card associated with it. One with the card associated with it and no more than whatever you spend in a week. If you use a credit card, it totally doesn't matter, it's the banks money, not yours that they'd steal.

So whenever you find yourself in a situation where someone wants you to decide something fast that you didn't know about and isn't a direct threat to your life, don't do it. Think about it first.

It's impossible to keep up with all the scams, but if you stop to think and never take rash decisions you don't have to. Slow is safe.

I'm well aware of the (lack of true) financial implications but I still get the urgency and need to speed up because of the violation and shock that someone is impersonating me RIGHT NOW! It feels similar to a physical threat, or enough so that our bodies react the same way. It is really hard to develop control unless you're exposed to this situation, so I like your strict yet general rule to (a) classify the situation, (b) slow down. Even enough time for 10 deep breaths is likely enough to get you centered and thinking clearly.

Yep. In the US, you are not liable for any fraudulent transactions reported within 60 days. You can easily wait until you get your next statement.

That's assuming the bank actually finds the transaction(s) were fraudulent when they do their "investigation". If they disagree with you and decide it wasn't fraudulent for whatever reason it's quite often a giant pain to argue with them and get it sorted out.

There was a relatively recent case of Bank of America deciding eight months later that it wasn't a fraud and clawing back their provisional refund. It turns out that the original card was intercepted in the mail and they simply issued a duplicate without preventing the use of the first, but it took the victim's attorneys to get the evidence from the bank, connect the dots and figure out this happened.

I'd love to read about this. Could you link an article?

https://www.nj.com/news/2022/03/bank-warns-customer-of-1200-...

I got some details wrong; in particular, the initial dispute denial was after two months (with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau agreeing with the bank after another two months), and the resolution followed NJ Advance Media contacting BofA.

The burden of proof is on the merchant. If they don’t have a signed receipt or video evidence they probably can’t win (so any online purchases are doomed). I’ve never failed a dispute in around 25 times, including several in the range of $2k+

No it's not. It's on you to persuade the bank it was fraudulent. If the bank doesn't believe it is fraudulent then they won't claw the money back from the merchant. Source: personal experience.

The bank is required by law to provide you the evidence supporting their decision -- if you request it.

12 CFR § 1026.13 (f)(2)

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/12/1026.13

Thank you, I will use this. I'm about to contact their head of legal.

Exactly this. I bought something online. The company shipped it, but FedEx screwed up and sent it back to the merchant. The merchant never responded to me after that and then went bankrupt. I called my bank (Square) and they said it wasn't fraud as the package had been "delivered". I pointed out it had been delivered back to the merchant, and they said that still counted as delivered in their support script. They told me the only way to fix it was to call FedEx and somehow scam them into changing the status of the package online. I tried to get them to change their support script but they decided it was easier just to terminate my account instead.

I'm saying that if a bank calls you and they already suspect that a transaction is fraudulent, you don't have to answer the phone right away.

This exact scam happened to a coworker's wife and the bank refused to consider it fraud since she "authorized" it by giving the confirmation code for Apple Pay to the attacker.

I find it interesting that this is the level of detail discussed with the bank. Our family has had 3 instances of unauthorized charges over the years, and the most we've ever done was to sign a form that basically says "we didn't make these charges"

Did they volunteer these details or were they asked? This is just conjecture, but sometimes when people volunteer too much information to front-line support you can get erratic responses if they latch on to superficial parts of the story rather than the underlying message.

i.e. support just hears "I gave someone access", and they close the ticket under "customer authorized someone else to purchase", because they're following a decision tree, not analyzing the root cause of a security incident.

This is one of the nice things with credit cards. I've never had an issue with a chargeback, and in the case where a card was stolen the charges were just reversed.

In general, banking customer service sucks. I try to buy everything on my AMEX. Their service is excellent. I've never had to fill out a dispute form or give them any kind of proof when disputing a transaction, just a short call and they take care of it.

If someone wipes out my bank account and I can't pay any bills, am I liable for those charges? What about the associated late charges? What about when service is terminated to my home?

If someone takes money from my account, it is absolutely urgent.

This is the primary reason why I stopped using my bank card for anything but the ATM at said bank. A scammer wiping out my checking account is more than an inconvenience, even if the bank only needed a day or so to replenish the account.

Now I use a "proper" credit card for anything. If a crook manages to run up a tab on that thing I still have all my cash for whatever scrapes may come along.

I had a friend who had their bank account cleaned out by a wire transfer of 200K in the same week he is trying to close on a house.

The bank executed on their promises of no disruption to his transfers; they told him he did not have to worry and the customer service was so terrific, he said he was going to stay with the bank.

"Did you ask if there were other accounts at the bank that had been accessed in this way?"

"A wire transfer to an international location went through with no red flags and 0 notifications?"

"Can you ask your security department to produce a report of their investigation into the matter?"

Nobody asks those questions.

> there's no urgency on your end.

There is, if you have recurring payments on the same card. If the bank knows there is fraud, some won't honor even known recurring payments. The card may be outright cancelled.

If one of those recurring payments is, eg, your Apple icloud or personal gmail/gsuite/gworkplace account, you better hop to with the utmost urgency.

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