Talktalk have had the banking and personal details of millions of customers stolen, and therefore many current and previous customers have been compromised.

Now in the media, customers are being warned what they must do.. watch out for having their identities hijacked.. watch out for emails from people purporting to be TalkTalk, even though TalkTalk will in fact be emailing their customers.

Problems like this have happened before, and will happen again.

For this to be profitable for the criminal, its the next phase that is important. The criminal must now get money from the customers account, and place it into their own. They need the banks to do this, and the banks will.

A woman in Lymington unwittingly gave her debit card details to a ‘I am from Microsoft’ scammer, to pay them £30 to fix her computer remotely. She realised her mistake half an hour after making it, and contacted her bank, cancelled the card, and then visited her bank branch. They said that £450 had been requested from Western Union, but had not yet left her account. Despite knowing the transaction was fraudulent they said THERE WAS NOTHING THEY COULD DO ABOUT IT! There is a rule in banking that once money is ‘promised’ between banks it must be delivered.

That money left her account, went to another account and probably left that one and went via several jumps to other accounts. At each stage the banking industry has an account through which the money is moving, and attached to each account in the chain is a name and address. What do they do about it.. seemingly nothing. The last place the money ends up must be the perpetrator of the crime, or someone in close partnership.

Lets tackle this crime properly. Follow the money and get it back! Make it impossible for someone to have a bank account which is unverified.

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