Fraud Victim? No Automatic Refunds For You, Says Bank Chief

Think you automatically qualify for an automatic refund when you’re a victim of bank fraud? Think again.

You’d better take “duty of care,” at least with RBS.

CNBC reports news that RBS CEO Ross McEwan told The Daily Mail that banks may not always need to shoulder the blame and the financial responsibility if customers are the ones who lack cybersecurity smarts and dole out details — of the personal kind — to online bad guys. Said the executive to the paper, “We are working very hard to help customers detect when there are difficulties, but I think this has to be in partnership with the customer and with the bank … You can’t keep blaming this on an organization where customers don’t take their own duty of care as well.”

The CEO said that tech, and hardware in particular — especially the hardware that has the most compromising of data — should be handled with cybersecurity in mind: “When people are passing their iPads or laptops over with their passwords and the likes, there’s got to be a care here, otherwise this will just become a major issue for all and the cost will pass through.”

CNBC pointed out that the banking firm is 72 percent publicly funded on the British taxpayers’ dime. The remarks come amid a backdrop where the Financial Conduct Authority has said that banks should offer automatic refunds to fraud victims, except where customers can be shown to have authorized transactions or are at fault, noted CNBC.

Fraud in the U.K. is no small matter, as KPMG said that level is about 1.1 billion pounds, annually. Separately, and on the heels of those remarks, a spokesperson for the banking firm said that the quotes were taken out of context and that “the important thing to stress is that whenever a customer has suffered a loss, we review the situation, we establish the facts and we make a decision (whether to refund or not) on a case-by-case basis.”

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