UK Bank TSB Admits 1,300 Accounts Hit By Fraud Amid IT Meltdown

An anonymous reader shares a BBC report: Life savings have been stolen from TSB accounts by fraudsters "exploiting" the bank's IT problems, with 1,300 people losing money. On occasions, people were waiting on the phone for up to nine hours to report cases, the bank's boss Paul Pester has told MPs. He said that 70 times the normal level of fraud attacks were seen last month. The introduction of a new IT system in April left customers struggling to make transactions and see their balances. The bank said it would compensate customers in full for any fraud they suffered. The evidence came after the financial regulator confirmed that it was investigating TSB and criticised Mr Pester for an "optimistic view" of services after the meltdown.

Re:I'm Sticking With TSB

[cayenne8]

Sure gives a person a "lot of faith" in a cashless society, eh?

1300 / 70 = ~19

[mccalli]

(rounded obviously). Only 19 successful attempts per month is the average?

Re:

[Required Snark]

"70 times the normal level of fraud attacks were seen last month"

If it was your personal account it would be a 100% failure. Why are you trying to make it seem less incompetent and damaging then it actually is? Do you have a personal interest in promoting electronic theft?

Re:

[grep -v '.*' *]

I think his point is: Only 19 successful attempts per month is the average?

If you're a bank, I'd think (hope!) that you have 0 successful attacks per month, and hope that you have a rounded 0.0 successful attacks per year.

Also, you'd want to weight them per customer. Someone successfully grabbing an account from a rooted unprotected cell phone is NOT the same thing as grabbing all of the accounts from the mainframe even though they're both a "single" attack.

GDPR?...

[froggyjojodaddy]

Is this the first major violation since GDPR came into effect? Will be very interesting to know what will happen..

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[Shimbo]

The bank lost the money. The still owes the customers their funds. The customers only loose if the bank goes out of business.

Customers generally don't lose when the bank goes out of business because of deposit protection. They generally do lose when they authorize the transfer of funds to a fraudster, although in this case customers may be luckier than usual because the bank is partly at fault for not having enough people to answer the phone.

It's just getting worse isn't it?

[Rick Schumann]

There aren't fewer successful attacks of this kind, there are more of them as time passes, and the consequences of them are getting worse not better. There's obviously a fundamental problem with these critical systems and obviously nobody is doing anything about it. Do we need to go back to doing everything with paper until everyone gets their act together and fixes it?

The best part of the summary?

[bobstreo]

"The bank said it would compensate customers in full for any fraud they suffered."

I believe my solicitors may have a slight difference of opinion of the number of significant digits of compensation...

 

dog bites man; contract law falls off turnip truck

[epine]

Life savings have been stolen from TSB accounts ...

Dog bites man. Contract law falls off turnip truck. Learned-helplessness porn, FTW. You know, could you grab a brain, please?

How about this, instead?

Illicit transactions savage TSB bank balances, nominally wiping out the life savings of some customers, most of whom are now shitting themselves to have TSB man-up pronto and restore their legally correct bank balances, ASAP.

I'm sure there's a nasty time gap between pronto and ASAP, because numerical restitutio

Re:

[Terry Carlino]

If anybody is keeping their 'life savings' in a bank they're doing it wrong. A bank is a place to keep working funds, not life savings. Anything you have in a bank is losing money to inflation. It's not working for you, it's working for the bank.

Re:

[Terry Carlino]

This just isn't true. In cases of identity theft the direct financial cost is almost always born by either the banks or the credit card companies.

It is the indirect financial cost which is born by the victim. This typically is the inability to procure future loans due to erroneously damaged credit history caused by the thief. Civil problems due to fraudulent contracts signed by the thief which must be litigated and such.

The direct financial cost is covered in the U.S..