Of course they could, and they already do with all the usual warnings. All you can do as a bank is add plenty of warnings and hope that at least some customers will then think twice and clock that something “isn’t right”. This new feature gives an extra opportunity to do that relatively unobtrusively, which is a win regardless of how you look at it.
Exactly, and a prime example of how a major “line of defence”, in the shape of Confirmation of Payee, is regularly circumvented through social engineering. It doesn’t matter how many times banks say “we will never say move your money to a safe account”; people sadly will, and do, still fall for it.
However, on the bright side, far fewer people fall for it now than did before when CoP wasn’t a thing - so it has “worked”, just not obviously to a 100% rate of success.
Just stumbled on this conversation and wanted to add my support for this feature. My partner was recently a victim of impersonation fraud and lost a considerable amount of money after taking out a loan under false pretences.
Unfortunately we became aware of the new feature after the damage was done, and wholeheartedly agree with the suggestions to push this to the app homepage or send a push notification. If this had happened, the scam would have ended there and no money would have left her account.
Looking forward to seeing future updates on this feature.
Sorry to hear about your partner’s unfortunate negative experience. Increased support for such features is always a positive though, and will help stop other people going through the same thing.
In an ideal world the app would detect an on-going phone call and if the call is spoofing the Monzo number (or using a known scam variant of the number) a warning will be shown in app and the account would be frozen… whether this is technically possible is another question…
If they tried to tie it to active calls, it would actually be more dangerous, since if you didn’t get a popped up warning, more people would assume it was legit, and if they’re not spoofing the Monzo number, or if they’ve called you on a different phone - I have 2 mobiles, both with Monzo installed, and also a landline (yeah, I’m that old) though the landline never gets used (I’m not THAT old). So there’s no way they could even vaguely reliably detect that someone had called me and was pretending to be Monzo.
The only way it can reliably work is if you manually to manually go into the app and check it, but that means that it really has to be trivial to find in the app, so that everyone knows that it’s there and where to find it, so they immediately think to check it if they get a call.
Something like a status between the profile icon and upgrade star, small, and always visible on the home page, would be ideal.
But building in too many smarts would just be building in more failure cases, and make it less reliable.
All bank should do this and on the screen where you make payments.
I still sadly think some scammers will still talk people around this and make them believe it’s not showing because it’s a ‘special’ security service or such like.
Ok, so if you don’t want that, how do you propose to reduce the amount of fraud taking place where people are tricked into believing their bank really is calling them, and they believe they are at risk.
It might seem on paper and in the cold light of day something you wouldn’t fall for but sadly it does happen and these people are extremely effect at what they do.
I think you would have to totally change user behaviour when answering a phone …dunno about everybody else but I put my phone to my ear when it rings… I would have to look at my phone on speakerphone , go in to Monzo app , tap my profile pic , tap settings , tap privacy and security …
Anarchist
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One of us might be.
My understanding was that the fraudster would call, persuade you to open the app while the call was in progress, the app would detect that you were on a call, and flash up a warning.
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Anarchist
(Press ‘Help’ search ‘Contact us’ or email help@monzo.com or call 0800 802 1281)
86
Spookily enough, I’ve just received an email about it. This is how it works;
