Legal News

Alex Duke, 43, owner of Exit Interiors, Harrogate, who lost nearly £50,000 in an online scam which almost bankrupted her business before she could manage to get the money paid back, has called for an overhaul of the banking operating system to protect victims of fraud.
In May, a fraudster from the United Arab Emirates emailed an order for £5,200 of lighting.
Ms Duke say she receives a handful of orders from the Middle East every year but always treats them in the same way, circumspect, but proceed with caution and not do anything until payment has been received.
A few days later she received an email saying someone in the man’s office had made a mistake and paid £52,000 instead of £5,200 and could she repay the difference when the money transfer arrived in her account.
Around two weeks later an uncleared deposit arrived in her bank account for £52,000 and the next day its status had been changed to “cleared funds” by the bank, so Ms Duke ordered the lighting and repaid the difference.
But instead the scammer had posted Ms Duke’s bank a fraudulent cheque for £52,000 and it was this which appeared in her account.
The bank made the transfer and then two hours later contacted her to say the cheque that she had sent them for £52,000 was fraudulent.
When her account was said to be cleared it was actually a seven day clearing process.
She said that she had described what had happened, to the bank, and despite being told later that it was a known scam, they didn’t do anything to stem it.The bank laid the whole liability on her in case they were unable to get back the money.
Two and half weeks she was not getting any information then she reported it the police who told her that they couldn’t help her as it was n international case.
All her direct debits were just getting bounced and she couldn’t get any of her orders shipped.
After she gave a radio interview the senior people in the bank only got involved and they resolved it ?very quickly and got her money back.
They told her that they had lessons to learn and were changing policy.
Mike Andrews, head of newly formed national E-Crime trading standards unit based in Northallerton, York and Suffolk, said the cost to the UK economy had been estimated at between £3bn and £10bn a year.
This type of fraud was being committed all the time. As more and more people do their transactions online and more and more people carry out their lives over the internet that is where the fraudsters operate. A lot of the scams being investigates have not changed; they were just on a different medium.
These were organised criminals gangs from across the world.