This is a series of steps for attempting to recover money stolen by fraudsters.

It has been created by Barrister  Gideon Roseman following his skirmish with fraudsters. You can read about that at

https://fightback.ninja/amateur-detective-recovers-stolen-money/

1. Immediately phone your bank and ask to speak with the fraud team

Explain what has happened and demand they immediately contact the fraudster’s bank, i.e.  the bank you transferred your money to.

2. Immediately contact a solicitor or barrister who can accept instructions directly from members of the public (or alternatively you can attempt to do this yourself). Ask them to immediately make an application to freeze the fraudster’s bank account and any other bank account that the fraudster has with their bank. The application should include a request for an order that the fraudster’s bank provides the following information:

• all contact details (mobile phone, home phone, email address, residential address etc.) for all signatories to the fraudster’s bank account and any other bank account held in the fraudster’s name or any other signatory to this bank account that is held at the bank
• all bank statements for the fraudster’s bank account and any other bank account to which the fraudster or any other signatory has with the bank in question for a period of 6 months; and
• the current balance of all bank accounts with the bank that is in the fraudster’s or any other signatory’s name.

3. Once you get hold of the court order, this will need to be immediately emailed to the fraudster’s banks’ ‘court orders’ team who can process it. You can ask your bank for this email address.
4. As soon as you receive the information from the fraudster’s bank, consider the following points:

(i) has your money been transferred or paid to any recognisable company you can contact, such as a known retailer

(ii) if you can identify a company that has received your money, you can then contact this company, explain what has happened and request they either cancel the transaction made by the fraudster or request them to hold onto the money they have received and

(iii) has the money been transferred to other bank accounts.

5. If your money has been transferred out of the fraudster’s bank account and into another bank account, you have the option of returning to court and making an application for the information set out above and repeating the process set out above.
6. When you have received the fraudster’s bank account statements, try to work out the dates and times of the transfers out of their accounts. Your bank will be under a duty to contact the fraudster’s bankers, who will then freeze the fraudster’s account.

If your bank has failed to act within a reasonable period of time after you have notified them of the fraud, which has enabled the fraudster to transfer your money without a trace, it is likely that your bank will have breached their duty and will have to compensate you.

Good luck.

If you have any experiences with scammers, spammers or time-waster do let me know, by email.

To build up lists of email addresses that can be sold to spammers and scammers, hackers run software that scans websites and looks for email addresses.

This is called email harvesting and is done on a huge scale.

The hackers typically scan websites, mailing lists, internet forums, social media platforms and anywhere else they can find email addresses online.

The characteristic format for an email address is [email protected] so it is simple for email harvesters to read web pages and look for the @ symbol as it seldom occurs anywhere on webpages except in an email address.

The harvesters can also check for unusual variations on that theme e.g. User[at]domain.com or User[AT]domain[DOT]com

How to Protect Email Addresses

There are a series of steps you can take to protect any email addresses on your website from being harvested. These range from the simple to seriously complex and which method you should use depends on how much of a problem you have with harvesting.

Method 1 – Replacing the email address with a picture showing the email address

Method 2 – Separate the Email Address From the Website

The email address can be in a redirect statement

Method 3 – Mask the Email Address

This can be done by using HTML encoding e.g. using @ replaces the @ sign.

All characters can be encoded in this manner which makes the address difficult for the harvesters to find.

Method 4 – Use Javascript

The address can be divided into several parts that are dynamically composed by the browser when the website is called up.

Method 5 – Use a Captcha

A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge–response test you can add to a website page to ensure it is being read by a person not by software.

These have become very common on many websites so most people are used to them now.

Method 6 – Use a Contact Form

Instead of posting an e-mail address on a web page, create a contact form. This can capture more information in a structured manner from the user and lets you hide the email address in a separate script file.

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