Scam watch: have you been called by a wine ‘investment’ scam?

Couldn’t agree more dieseltaylor.

I can’t understand why telephone companies don’t block known nuisance calls and texts. They must be able to trace where they have come from and put a block on them.

Ofcom should be working with the telephone companies to stop them.

For some reason, banks seem unwilling to trace then try and retrieve where fraudulent money has gone.

Some time ago, I made an online purchase where I told the seller to refund my money and arrange collection when they sent an older model product than advertised. They refused and I asked my bank to retract the payment. The bank would not do that but they did reimburse me.

It would seem to me that the bank or credit card of origin should be held liable for fraudulent transactions not left to the goodwill of victims banks or other financial institutions.

Do you think anyone who has been the victim of any kind of fraud should be automatically compensated whatever the method of payment? Surely an individual has responsibility for their own actions?

With regard to credit cards, ideally the banks should not issue this form of facility to clients who are not trustworthy and I err on the side of the victim when they are scammed. I do not know though how you can deal with this in the real world.

As far as debit cards are concerned they are really just a more convenient way of making a bank transfer so I don’t see automatic recompense as appropriate unless the bank can recover the funds first. You could pay by normal bank transfer or cheque for example and I wouldn’t expect compensation then.

No, I don’t think all fraud victims should be automatically compensated. I don’t believe my bank should have compensated me on that occasion but they offered and as I was not going to get anywhere with the company, I accepted gratefully. It would have been better if the bank had traced the payment to the source and tried to retract the payment and the seller given a black mark against him. Too many of these and he would get labelled as a scammer for advertising new model items but shipping old models. It could enable a case to made against him at some stage.

Very often it is the victim’s fault for falling for these scams especially when they are get rich quick schemes that anyone should think twice about. The wine example above should not be compensated by his payment method as it was his own fault.

I do not agree with you, Markle. If you have exercised due diligence in sourcing goods or services from a company [that is, you have carried out reasonable research, sought opinions, recommendations or references, checked whether Which? or the personal finance sections of newspapers have made any comments, and looked on the internet to see if there are any reviews or reports] and you then consider that the company is good for your trade you should have nothing to worry about and can order with confidence. If something goes badly wrong I would not expect your bank to automatically reimburse you since you will have the name and registered address of the company and can take legal action yourself. I certainly don’t see how Companies House or the Regulator has any immediate obligation to you although where the sector is supervised by a regulator or an ombudsman they could investigate any miss-selling or other wrongdoing. The possible problem with ‘due diligence’ is that customers are so enamoured of the product, or its price, or the claims made for it, that they suspend their critical judgment and their ‘due diligence’ is not objective or diligent enough. Buying anything from an overseas supplier is always more risky because it will be outside the UK legal jurisdiction making any recovery more difficult and that needs to be factored into the ‘due diligence’. Making a substantial investment over the telephone would fail any normal due diligence exercise, as would buying something that you have no experience of and have only the seller’s word for. Buyers do have to accept the risk of their own judgments.