For most of the last century, Americans have felt a sense of security placing their money in banks.
That trust is waning. Nearly half of bank patrons surveyed expressed concern about the safety of their money ensconced in financial institutions after the collapse of Silicon Valley and Signature banks, a Gallup poll released in May revealed.
Those worries are likely to intensify if banks fail to provide a safety net to prevent wire transfer fraud. As it is, banks largely place the onus on fraud victims, the Sun-Times’ Mary Norkol and Stephanie Zimmermann reported in their recent investigation.
It’s not enough for banks to remind people that they shouldn’t give out their passwords or click on suspicious links. Savvy con artists are one step ahead of the rest of us, perfecting their ability to clear out bank accounts within seconds.
No one needs to physically rob a bank at gunpoint anymore when he or she can impersonate a sympathetic fraud prevention specialist and sweet talk bank clients into handing over their life savings. It shouldn’t be that easy. Banks need to step up their efforts to keep wire transfer fraud from proliferating.
To better protect customers, banks can delay larger wire transactions, add layers of scrutiny to the approval process or require customers to wire large amounts of cash in person at the bank, consumer advocates told Norkol and Zimmermann.
Banks’ fraud departments should also be operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When scammers from every corner of the world are up and running in all time zones, every minute counts.
If banks won’t improve security, Congress should toughen the Electronic Funds Transfer Act that was passed in 1978. That law protects U.S. consumers from fraud related to debit cards and some electronic transactions but not wire transfers.
Without stronger oversight, we’ll keep hearing about people losing tens of thousands of dollars, like a retired city worker who gave nearly $20,000 to a trickster.
Or Chicago Lawn resident Shaylah Ware, who had $33,900 taken from her Citibank account.
And West Loop salon owner Daniel Janicek, who tried to recover $19,000 a scammer took from his Chase Bank account. He told the Sun-Times reporters that when he called Chase around 11 p.m. to make a report he was told the bank’s fraud department wouldn’t open until the next morning at 7 a.m.
In 2021 alone, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received wire transfer fraud reports totaling $2.4 billion in losses. Those figures will rise if the banks don’t do more for their customers. We can bank on that.
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