Author: comptroller

Europcar Pay Drivers £38 million Compensation

Europcar UK has been found guilty of systemically inflating the cost of repairs through secret rebates with suppliers. This is clearly defrauding unsuspecting drivers.

Europcar customers who fell victim to fraudulent charges for repairs on hire cars will receive compensation as the company has set aside £38 million to repay them.

Up to half a million drivers were fraudulently charged inflated prices for repairing scrapes and other damage and will be reimbursed by the company.

Leicester City Trading Standards is still investigating the car hire firm over their actions.

Europcar’s UK division made a pre-tax loss last year of $40.3 million after setting aside £47 million to deal with the investigation. In the previous year it made a profit of £13.1 million.

A Europcar spokesman has said that the company is undertaking a thorough investigation and Europcar UK is fully cooperating with the authorities”.

Well done whoever spotted the scam and it’s certainly cost Europcar a lot of money.

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Fake Accident Calls

The phone rings and a voice says she is Katie and she’s calling about the accident.

“Go on” I reply assuming this is a scam call.

Again she tells me she’s calling about the car accident.

“Which one” I reply thinking to confuse her as she clearly she has no knowledge of who I am or whether I have recently been in a car accident.

There are about 170,000 road accidents in Great Britain per year where someone is injured and the figure including all minor bumps etc. where no injury occurred must be significantly higher.

Even so, the chances of a scammer getting through to someone who has had an accident recently must be fairly low.

However, even for someone who does drive and has not been involved in an accident recently it is probably confusing when someone calls to talk with you about ‘the accident you were involved in’

What do the scammers want from these calls?

There are various possible motives for them

  1. Collecting names and contact details for people who have been in accidents, so as to sell that data to insurance companies, car repair businesses etc.
  2. Standard phishing scams i.e. they try to get as much personal information from you to sell to other spammers and scammers
  3. A more elaborate con where they pretend to be an insurance company willing to pay you for the accident (but if accepted then they need retainers, pre payments etc., before you can get the cash which of course doesn’t exist)

Do not be taken in by these callers. If someone calls to ask you about any event – then check if they know who you are and dates, locations etc. of the event. Once asked these questions they will likely put the phone down.

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Tesco Bank Fined for Data Breach

Tesco Bank was fined £16.4m by the City watchdog over a cyber-attack it suffered that netted cyber criminals £2.26m.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said deficiencies at the bank had left account holders vulnerable to the incident. The bank had received a specific warning that was not properly addressed until the attack had started and the response was “too little, too late”.

This is the first time the FCA has issued a fine for a cyber-related incident.

Tesco Bank said that since the incident in November 2016 it had “significantly enhanced” security measures, and apologised to customers.

Mark Steward, executive director of enforcement and market oversight at the FCA, said the fine “reflects the fact that the FCA has no tolerance for banks that fail to protect customers from foreseeable risks”. Banks must ensure resilience against such crime reducing the risk of a cyber attack occurring in the first place, not only reacting to an attack.

Tesco Bank said the cyber attack in 2016 did not involve the theft or loss of any customers’ data but led to 34 transactions where funds were debited from customers’ accounts, and other customers having normal service disrupted.

The bank’s chief executive Gerry Mallon said: “We are very sorry for the impact that this fraud attack had on our customers.”

Banks and other financial institutions must learn that it’s cheaper to build proper protection that wait for a catastrophe to happen.

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