Comment by smcin
12 hours ago
Ask them their name/ last initial, employee ID or unique identifier for the conversation, direct phone number, job title and what location they're based at. Scammers will pretty much always refuse/argue/hang up on this (once I had one start insulting my mother in Hindi when I asked him this). Then call your bank's proper number and verify all of these details.
(But in any case your bank will never call outwards to you, unless you've specifically requested that, which you almost never do.)
Unfortunately my UK banks (and others) DO regularly make calls to me unannounced and demand my ID to 'prove who I am'. They are not scam calls and the callers cannot understand what they are doing wrong. If I'd had more strength in the last round of this stupidity I'd have done a number on them with the regulator. (I used to work in finance and was the director of a regulated financial entity, so I think I'd have a head start.)
In the US Caller ID has been so hopelessly compromised (for almost two decades now, that's on Congress) that financial institutions almost never make outbound calls, and only ever use standardized published numbers; I wasn't aware other countries differ so much.
Please tell us more context with regard to your UK banks making multiple unannounced calls demanding your ID ... were you an individual customer? finance director? MD? or what? Why on earth do they do that? Have you told them in writing not to? There must be more backstory to that.
Banking example: trying to move some savings from one UK bank to another - back to where the money had originally come from, and that had just purchased the first bank too. It took 8h on the phone over a week or so to get the money back, which was interspersed with a comedic number of calls from withheld numbers and people unknown to me demanding enough info to get access to my money. And other very poor practice. The bank even conceeded at least once in writing that it knew that it was screwing up and sent me £100 by way of apology - but carried right on screwing up.
Non-banking: getting a call out of the blue from my Internet Service Provider again demanding enough credentials to get access to my (business) account, and unable to understand why that was very poor practice. I used to like that ISP a lot, and have been with it for a looooooong time, but the angry exchange with who seems to have been my account manager has soured the relationship a lot.
My bank(s) have never called me and if they did I wouldn’t pick up - it’s definitely not a standard in the EU.
> They are not scam calls
What are they, then? Sales/marketing calls? Or some security notifications ("we noticed some suspicious operations in the last 3 days...")? If it's the former, that's still scam in my books. Specifically, it's a first-party scam, as opposed to a third-party scam, where some third party pretends to be your bank.
They both should be treated similarly; unfortunately, you can't report first-party scams to police.
Yeah as sibling points out, lots of orgs have scammy official security calls. This leads to a dance I have been through quite often.
Almost this exact thing has happened multiple times with one of my bank accounts which I can’t completely shut because of boring reasons but I have basically deprecated because they do this sort of nonsense. My main bank now is much better.
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In my experience they're security calls. UK has good opt out marketing rules for legit companies.
But the usual security call is exactly like a spam call, no authentication from their end, immediately requesting id verification "answer these security questions", and refusing to go off script.
People have been asking for years to be able to lodge a security challenge code on their profile that can add confidence in the caller. Given there are already multiple security questions on an account, this could be a process change: the security challenge script becomes "the first and sixteenth characters of your mother's maiden name are 7 and F, what are the third and fifth characters of your first pets name".
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Yeah and people call crypto a scam.
It mostly is, but Monero is pretty good.
it is time we have a good industry standard for this stuff
I dream of a time I don’t have a bank, or not in any traditional sense.
I’d been hunting for ways to use a Wisecard standoff a bank but got a bit wary of what would happen if they went bust. Government backed guarantee do not exist for Wise.