‘He spent thousands’: how a bank team tries to rescue scam victims | Scams

A widowed pensioner is on the end of the phone and he’s flustered. He’s expecting his girlfriend to move in with him next month. He has never met her, but he has photos of a young blonde woman and weeks of texts pledging her devotion.

On an industrial estate in Bootle on Merseyside, Clare is trying to deflate his dreams. She is a call handler on Santander’s Break the Spell team, which is part of the high street bank’s fraud prevention department. It is her job to convince the man that his girlfriend is actually a scammer who has defrauded him of his savings.

Fraudsters store than £30m from Santander customers last year by conning them into making payments for fake goods or services. Across the UK banking sector as a whole £213m of customers’ money was lost to scams where people were tricked into sending money to bank accounts operated by criminals in the first six months of 2024, according to the trade body UK Finance.

The prevalence and complexity of scams has soared since the pandemic, and so has the financial hit to banks and building societies. Many were signed up to a voluntary industry scheme to reimburse victims who were not unduly negligent, but new rules introduced in October have made such refunds mandatory, so there is a new urgency for banks to protect their customers’ savings.

The 23 staff on the Break the Spell team deal with customers who have been so thoroughly taken in by a scam that they refuse to accept they are being defrauded. Most of them have been bamboozled into paying their savings into fake investment schemes or the pockets of criminal gangs who woo them online and promise romance. They are referred to Break the Spell by the bank’s fraud contact centre once ordinary interventions fail to persuade them that their transactions are suspect, and it is up to the team to win their trust and save them from themselves. It can take months.

Clare is not making headway with the widower. She has been calling him regularly for a fortnight. His payments to the woman have been blocked by the bank, and Clare has urged him to discuss his plans with family members, but the scammer has convinced him their relationship must be kept secret.

He has already sent thousands of pounds in response to her sob stories and promises. He recently travelled across the UK for a rendezvous with his intended, but she did not show up and had an emotional excuse at the ready.

On Clare’s computer screen are images of the woman upon whom the man has pinned his hopes. A reverse image search – an easy way to find out if photos have appeared on the internet – shows them replicated under different names across myriad social media sites – evidence that scammers are using them to woo victims.

The man, however, is not ready to accept that he is a victim. Clare urges him to visit his local bank branch and perform a reverse image search himself, but he stalls. He will wait until next month, he says. By then, he hopes his new life will have started.

“Romance scams can go on for years, and if you’re calling from the bank and telling them their wife-to-be isn’t real, you have to be really sensitive,” Clare said. “Last week he finally accepted that he was being scammed, but then she worked on him and now he’s back in deep.”

The UK’s Banking Protocol scheme encourages staff to involve the police if they believe a customer needs protection from criminal activity, and officers will be sent to the widower’s home if he ceases contact for more than a week.

Break the Spell was set up in 2021, with a behavioural psychologist training staff to help them understand victims’ often baffling intransigence. It has since prevented £17.6m from being handed to fraudsters.

An average of 50 customers a day are referred to the team because their contact with bank staff has raised red flags. An agent investigates their account and their interactions with bank staff, and establishes where and why the suspect payments are being made. Once they have evidence of a scam, they call the customer, and will continue to call them over the next weeks and months until the spell is broken.

The work can be troubling. Victims can become irate when their payments to a scammer have been suspended, and traumatised when they discover their bright future is a chimera.

“They’ve been so thoroughly groomed that they trust the fraudster more than us, and often they lie to us,” Clare said. “One victim had been sucked into a cryptocurrency scam and had spent thousands. He was persuaded he had to pay more in to get his money out, so he took out a loan to fund the payments, had to remortgage his house and lost his marriage.”

The fraudsters are not lone individuals in a bedsit. They often operate from “call centres” staffed by criminal gangs with the personal data of hundreds of bank customers on their computer screens. Details of victims’ habits and hobbies are harvested from social media so the fraudsters can pretend they have common ground and foster an online friendship.

The requests for money start later and typically small. The fraudsters often ask for gift vouchers, which they can copy and sell on. When a victim runs out of money or hope, their data will be sold on to other gangs. Those most readily defrauded tend to be lonely, depressed or recently bereaved.

Clare and her colleagues take each case personally. “You have to,” she ssaid. “You have to enter into their lives and understand why they are doing what they are doing, and sometimes the hardest cases come home with you.”

Once a customer has accepted they have been conned, the team stays in touch if necessary to support them. The psychological impact usually outweighs the financial one. Santander fully reimbursed 69% of reported fraud losses last year. After the rule change in October, the figure will be nearer 100%.

The widower should be able to make a claim for the thousands he has already lost, and a block on suspect payments is preventing him losing more.

How could anyone be so foolish, I asked when Clare recounted the cases she was working on. After hearing her compassionate reasoning, I wondered how could anyone be so lonely. But she put me right. “This job has taught me it could be any of us,” she said. “It could be you.”