EU Court Tells Banks to Stop Being Cheap Bastards and Pay Up

Oh look, some bloody Advocate General in the EU has finally pulled their head out of their arse long enough to state the bleeding obvious: if some poor sod gets fleeced by a phishing scam, the banks have to fork over the cash immediately instead of dragging it through eighteen months of legal red tape and bureaucratic wankery.

Apparently, banks have been acting like spoiled little shits, refusing to refund victims because “oh, the customer clicked a dodgy link” or “they didn’t protect their credentials properly.” Well no shit, Sherlock. Users are about as security-conscious as a goldfish with a head injury. That doesn’t give you the right to keep their bloody money when some Eastern European scammer empties their account because your “secure” banking app has all the security of a wet paper bag.

The opinion – which let’s be honest, the courts will probably follow because it’s actually fucking sensible for once – basically says banks are liable for these fraudulent transfers under the Payment Services Directive. So now they have to pay up straight away, not after they’ve made the victim dance through hoops, fill out seventeen forms in triplicate, and sacrifice a goat to the compliance department.

You can just picture the bank executives right now, can’t you? Crying into their £500-a-bottle champagne because they might actually have to invest in some decent fraud detection instead of just blaming the user and pocketing the interest. Boo-fucking-hoo. Maybe if you spent less time lighting cigars with £50 notes and more time implementing basic two-factor authentication that doesn’t involve carrier pigeons, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

Of course, this being the EU, there’s probably a thousand pages of legalese attached to this, and the banks will still find ways to delay payments until the sun burns out. But theoretically, phishing victims should get their money back without having to wait for the second coming of Christ.

Read the full story here, if you can stomach the legalese

Speaking of phishing, reminds me of the time a user came crying to me because they’d “accidentally” transferred their life savings to a Nigerian prince who promised them a share of his inheritance. I told them the only inheritance they’d see was the Darwin Award. Then I “accidentally” wiped their home directory while “investigating” the breach. They didn’t complain twice. The BOFH way: zero tolerance for stupidity, maximum contempt for humanity.

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