Charming how the bank just skates through this whole thing with a little halo over its head. They should be liable for their own failure to authenticate the customer. Immediately restore the $5k, then they chase after the thief.
I've got to wonder how much people's broken understanding of these situations is an extension of that same old mistaken belief that banks hold your money in their safe or something. Notice how she's continually going on about "my money". Whereas actually your bank balance is merely a debt the bank owes you, which cannot have been altered by the bank being defrauded. Any more than a cursory one or two business days to fix her account ledger is unacceptable. If after 60, 90, or however many days the bank cares to spend investigating it turns out that the account owner lied when disputing the original transaction, that would be its own fraud and can be prosecuted post-facto the same as anything else.
Three if you consider that New York let the criminal walk and go on the lam without posting any bail, due to a 2020 (presumably late 2020) 'law'
From the post:
> The bail reform law, which took effect in New York in 2020, eliminated the requirement for defendants to put up cash bail for most misdemeanors and nonviolent felony charges. It was meant to limit incarceration of defendants in New York who couldn’t afford to get out on bail while their cases play out, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union. The nonprofit’s website says reform has been essential to “upholding due process, advancing racial justice, and protecting public health” during the pandemic.
It's often amusing--and sometimes enlightening--to imagine how well the same nonsense-logic would work if it was being used to the benefit of a consumer instead of an institution:
"Hi Bank, I just sent enough money to fully pay off my mortgage! Now I fully own my house and our business is done... Wait, you didn't get it? That was some scammer who showed up randomly at my door with a fake business card? Well, that sucks.... for you, that is. I hope you manage to get your money back from them someday, ciao!"
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/25/identi...
Banks are notorious for adopting new technology at a glacial pace, often only when forced to do so.
Witness the adoption of chip and pin in the U.S. oh wait, we still haven’t properly adopted it and a stolen card can just be tapped on the terminal of most retailers in 2024 with no additional authentication.
Actually, when someone signed up for a Bank of America checking account with my AT&T information, I notified AT&T once I was done with BofA... And AT&T ignored it, until 2 years later.
Whatever BS shreading and information hygeine I do amounts to nothing when a big company lets stuff out. Or when my employer's HR person keeps unencrypted payroll files on a USB drive in their car in SF.
But the bank also has to deal with dishonest people who might make fraudulent claims about being defrauded.
If the bank is concerned about fraudulent claims about being defrauded, that's just another case of them needing to improve their fraud detection process.
US banking is notoriously sloppy about allowing withdrawals with just knowledge of routing number and bank account number, while every check written contains both numbers -- in Europe, the bank account number can only be used to transfer money to the account (and checks practically don't exist).
One day out of the blue, some hundreds of dollars were transferred out of my American bank account, seeming to claim purchases in a city several hours away. I didn't authorize such transactions. They were direct debits of my account, not credit card charges. A few days later, my money was returned. How was that possible? Why did the bank agree to transfer money out of my account?
All the way back in the 90s, my European bank gave me a one-time codebook, to be used in addition to username and password to authenticate online transfers. Whenever I was close to running out of codes, they gave me a new codebook. Managing to steal my password wouldn't have let an attacker easily empty my account.
My European bank in a small city, that I had been a customer of for decades, and whose employee that I was interacting with being a family friend, verified my passport before discussing a loan.
For this and many other reasons, I will never use a commercial bank again, if I can possibly avoid it.
Could we write laws that require banks to both reimburse the money stolen and to either catch the criminal or to pay more?
I think the banks would just deny that a crime occurred.
As tempting as it is, I have to be against it for now