Kerre Woodham: Should there be some kind of fund for people ripped off in scams?

Now this is another tricky one and we have talked about it before, and it's in the news again. I am all for personal responsibility in owning your own mistakes.

Case in point is me overpaying my insurance premiums by thousands and thousands and thousands for about 10 years because I hadn't checked the fine print. Nobody to blame but me.

Unfortunately, as much as I had tried to squirm and writhe in my own mind, ultimately me, I'm the one, it’s me. But when it comes to banking scams I tend to side with Jon Duffy, the Consumer NZ Chief Executive.

He says our consumer protection ecosystem is massively out of step with many jurisdictions we like to compare ourselves to. He says, most big banks in the UK are signatories to a voluntary code where they typically refund scam victims for their losses.

He would like to see a similar stance taken by the banks in New Zealand. He says we expect banks here to argue they should not be liable for the customer’s perceived mistakes, but the way we see it right now, customers are carrying pretty much all the risk and the fight against scams.  

The case in point is the story doing rounds in media this morning.

BNZ is refusing to reimburse scam victims who lost $430,000 between them, this particular one was a Citibank scam. They argue they should get the money refunded because the Citibank scam was known to the New Zealand banking industry and had been for at least a year and the BNZ should have known about that.  

Scammers are really good at what they do. They hone their craft. And work it for each community.

Should there be a kind of trust fund for people who have been ripped off? If you pass the criteria, the banks can all contribute to this and all take a collective responsibility to ensure they don't have to keep popping up the trust fund each and every time somebody has ripped off.

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