Australians are losing billions in scams and there are calls for banks to pay them back

Bill Hall lost $26,000 in an invoice scam after an email from his builder was intercepted and resent with new payment information. 

The fraudulent invoice looked exactly the same as one sent by Mr Hall’s builder a couple of months earlier, except for the bank account number.

After transferring $26,345 to the Citibank account listed on the new invoice, Mr Hall thought his builder had been paid. 

It took about three weeks for his financial institution Bendigo Bank and Citibank to tell him they thought he’d been scammed. 

“I was shocked, I thought ‘how can this happen?’,” Mr Hall said.

When he asked why the banks hadn’t checked the name of his builder against the fraudulent account number, he said Bendigo Bank and Citibank just passed the buck.

“They just didn’t seem to care, they washed their hands of it,” Mr Hall said.

“The responsibility should always be [on the banks] to tally up the name and the number on the account. It is so simple – It can’t be that hard.”

About a month after his money disappeared, he got a partial refund from Citibank of just over $6,000. He was told that’s all that was left in the scammer’s account.

When Mr Hall lodged a complaint with the Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA), they did nothing because he was not a…