Financial Services Complaints Limited (FSCL), one of the dispute resolution schemes for the financial services sector, is warning consumers to be vigilant when it comes to fraud, following a noticeable increase in complaints around financial scams over the past year.
FSCL Financial Ombudsman and CEO, Susan Taylor, is highlighting a wide range of sophisticated incidents of fraud.
“Perhaps the most notable financial product [where] we are seeing more fraudulent activity is with online investment companies, often involving ‘bitcoin’ scams," Taylor says.
FSCL is highlighting the dangers of scams to coincide with the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) promoting an international fraud awareness week this week that's designed to educate organisations, employees and consumers about ways to prevent fraud.
One case, highlighted in FSCL’s annual report this year saw a woman lose $50,000 after scammers replicated the website of an investment company.
Taylor says with most of these scams, the investor is lulled into a false sense of security, as they initially see a return on the original investment. Consumers should be alert to the possibility of scams when deciding to invest online.
“It is a fairly common scam method to tempt someone to invest more money after initially providing a good return. When the consumer invests more money, the fraudster then disappears taking the money with them,” Taylor says.
In another case, an investor complained to FSCL when he used his credit card to purchase bitcoin for some online investment opportunities. He was scammed and lost the bitcoin worth about $13,300.
FSCL found the investor had authorised the transactions he was complaining about, so any protections for unauthorised card transactions didn’t apply.
“The circumstances in which consumers can recover funds spent on a credit card are limited. Consumers shouldn’t rely on being able to get a refund in place of carefully considering the trustworthiness of who they deal with online,” Taylor says.
2 Comments
I don't think that is the point of the article.
Mirror sites are easy to set up and investment platforms are not immune. Easy to get your username, password. The one time code is then easy to get via sms or setting up email forwarding on your already hacked email account.
Why all financial sites do not support FIDO security keys is beyond me. We are all happy to have car keys, house keys but think a computer key is not needed. This should be mandated.
Honest people do not know this stuff. How many of you out there answer honestly to, so called, security questions? Look up password entropy and tell fibs just remember what fibs you told aka use a password manager.
We welcome your comments below. If you are not already registered, please register to comment.
Remember we welcome robust, respectful and insightful debate. We don't welcome abusive or defamatory comments and will de-register those repeatedly making such comments. Our current comment policy is here.