To the editor,
Re: Public warned about ‘call-spoofing’ scammers, Aug 14.
I am extremely aggrieved to hear about people losing their hard-earned savings to scammers in this way.
Considering the incredible technological feats humans have achieved, it just seems to me that there should be some way to prevent anyone from pulling this scam. I do not understand why our financial institutions are not able to protect their phone numbers from being used by money scammers. For crying out loud – the main reason we put our money into the bank is to protect it. Why haven’t they done something to prevent this from happening? How are they getting away with this? None of the financial institutions I have visited provide any printed warnings about this and the customer service representatives don’t provide any information about this issue.
I have personally asked many friends and acquaintances if they knew that their banks’ phone number could be ‘spoofed’ by thieves and many of them said they had no idea that this was possible.
So, if for some reason there is no way to stop phone numbers from being used to steal money from our bank accounts – and I doubt that this is true – at the very least public education should be provided from these institutions before the fact, not after, and if that education is absent then financial institutions should be responsible for not adequately protecting their customers’ deposits.
Shannon Iverson, Nanaimo
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