Posts Tagged banks
Sauce For The Goose….
Posted by murray in Latest News on July 10th, 2010
The BIS (Department for Business, Innovation and Stupidity) have “advised” in such a way that tour operators may well have to pick up the tab for all those caught up in the ash cloud. Further, they now suggest that tour operators should be able to forsee events which even skilled and trained geologists and volcanologists find impossible to predict.
We do not have to look too far back to find a rather different example in the approach of Her Majesty’s Grateful Government. When the bankers fell into crisis (in an event which was easily foreseeable, save that the Serious Farce Office and other regulators who were supposed to watch out for exactly that sort of thing were all too busy “doing” dinners and lunches) we tax payers were told how seriously serious the matter was and that we would have to mortgage our children’s and our children’s children’s futures to bail out Bankers so that they would not have to sell their second yachts and/ or helicopters and wind up having to use the train to get to work like the rest of us.
Of course, the ash cloud matter is different. We are only talking about small people and small money and true to form, the present UK Government follows the maxim: “Money talks, merit walks” – rather like the USA Government getting all hot under the collar about BP and spilt oil, whilst doing relatively little about their own errant industries wreaking havoc in foreign pastures, specifically, Bhopal.
We have, however, moved away from a feudal economy towards a welfare economy. This is not a bad thing. The world is just too dangerous a place for private insurance companies to cope with (as Niall Ferguson said) and welfare covers a much wider orbit than 10 shillings and sixpence a week from the ‘nash. One of the main purposes of Government is to step in when calamity threatens to overwhelm; the insurer, so to speak, of the last resort. Irrespective of the corner of the business involved. The global affect of the bank disaster scales down easily to the European disaster of the ash cloud. In both cases, a whole industry is at stake. In both cases, many firms are at risk and in both cases, many jobs would be lost, were the industry involved compelled to shoulder all the costs of an unforseen, un-predictated and devastating calamity. Indeed, it could be argued that, as the banking disaster was not a natural phenomonon but a man-made one, the ash cloud is, possibly, a more deserving cause than the Banks.
Fraud – How to get rich!
Posted by murray in Latest News on August 5th, 2009
Lot of talk about fraud and how horrible it is and how people get affected by it etc., etc. Lots of missives from the banks to merchants about checking this and checking that. Lots of chat about various scams going on and how people are making off with everyone’s money etc., etc., etc….
And it will not stop. The reason it will not stop is because nobody is actually doing anything about it. True enough, the powers that be will warn you about it and suggest ways of not being caught, what to look for and so on – but nobody is actually doing anything about it.
For example, I picked up a fraudulent transaction going through the website. This was a customer trying to defraud a retailer (Yes, it does happen). I collected all the information and evidence and because there was enough time, duly reported the facts of the matter to the Police, thinking that someone may like to go and bring the fraudster to justice. A very nice, (highly trained to be) concerned-sounding sort of person logged all the information, thanked me for reporting the matter and then…. well, and then nothing. Rather like going to the Doctor and then being told “Now, here’s two aspirin” – in other words, naff off.
The most irritating bit, was that the fraudster had the card details, name and address of a real live person. I could not contact that real live person, so I thought that I would contact my merchant service provider and ask them to get hold of the person and let them know that they had a problem. Nope, not interested. My provider has one of those sub-continent service centres, which means that you are talking to a highly trained parrott – my suggestion did not fit the call flow-chart and given that these places have all the initiative of road hump – the request was not understood and so fell on deaf ears. They were not going to lift a finger because they did not know which bank to contact – Really? So how come they can do a name and address check when it comes to authorisation?
Merchant providers are not actually interested in catching these villains – they are not really interested in the welfare of their cardholders and certainly not the welfare of their merchants. Sure (as I said) they will give you lots of “advice” on how to “protect” yourself – indeed, the merchant service providers “club” dish it out by the bucketful – but the reason why they do so is simply that it costs an arm and a leg in administration costs sorting the mess out. So, if they can cut the administration costs, so much the better. Otherwise, merchant service providers are more than happy – if the cardholder gets diddled, they simply charge the merchant back and if the cardholder takes money that he or she says they didn’t take, then MP’s simply say “rubbish, prove it” – leaving the cardholder with a stonk of an uphill battle trying to prove that he (or she) was in Land’s End at 19:00 on the 25th and not in Aberdeen.
Actually catch the fraudster – even when there are enough facts, is to much like hard (and costly) work – so it gets left to the hard pressed Constabulary who, as we know, “do not have the resources” (i.e. money) to send a couple of blokes round to feel someone’s collar.
So fraud is alive and well and will remain so as long as fraudsters can keep on going in the sure and certain knowledge that there is and always will be, one born every minute. They know that Banks and other institutions will keep on trying to “educate” people – but above all, they also know that no matter how many times they try it on, the magic words “lack of resources” will mean that no-one will coming knocking on their door.
