back to article UK bank chief stung in ID theft scam

Identity fraudsters have claimed the prize scalp of the chief exec of HBOS bank. Accounts belonging to Andy Hornby, 41, who earns an estimated £1m a year, were frozen after unauthorised withdrawals of at least £7,000 from his accounts. UK tabloid The Sun reports that crooks used an old bank statement from Hornby to pose as the …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Lol

    Justice without court involvment....flames as some poor wretch will probably loose thir job over this

  2. Tim Spence

    Brilliant

    Hehe, fantastic. That is all.

  3. kain preacher

    Wish this would happen more often

    Refused to clean up their act and he got stung

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hahahahaha, phuq-'m!

    'nuff said!

  5. Prof O. Und

    Maybe the banks will believe it happens now and take appropriate action?

    Sorry, I've been overcome with a raging bout of optimism today.

    I think I'll take a rest.

  6. peter
    Unhappy

    God, sorry

    I Can't remember my password

    What is your address, DOB, the last purchase you made with the card and your mothers given name.

    Oh yes wait, it's on this statement I picked up and the DOB is from a website such as xxxxx with complete Births Mariiges and Deaths up to 1983.

    Why I was calling, well I've just moved address, terrible hassle, yes I know, anyway lost the cards.... and the limit. can that be raised whilst i'm on the phone anyway.

    Fantastic, see you in hell.

  7. Sleeping Dragon
    Coat

    A Serious Matter

    Time and time again we see such utter stupidity allowing the poor and unfortunate public to be ripped off by poor banking practices...

    No, wait, who am I kidding....

    BWHAHAHAHAHAHA

    BWHAHAHAHAHAHA

    BWHAHAHAHAHAHA

    See how you fucking like it! Hey, bank bosses, get your damn act together and start remembering that it's OUR money in those accounts, not yours.

    Mines the one with the contents of a HBOS wastepaper basket stuffed into the inside pocket.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Classic!!

    It's only a shame his card wasn't skimmed at a rogue ATM.

    These fat-cat bankers have utter blind-faith in chip-n-pin. They need to wake up and smell the hot caffeinated beverage.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Dead Vulture

    I'd be laughing too ...

    I'd be laughing too, if it weren't the outfit that I use as my bank!

    If they are slack enough to let it happen to him, just how slack are they with my money??

  10. Marvin the Martian
    Thumb Down

    7000? That's... 2days wages?

    So if the guy takes out 2days' wages that's suspicious activity! So equivalently HBOS would block my account if I take out a malicious-looking 130quid? Pfhwew, lucky I'm not there...

  11. heystoopid
    Paris Hilton

    So

    So a true believer in his own banks insecurity of spending one cent in the dollar on security has been found !

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    It's a shame it wasn't a meaningful sum for him

    as then it'd be fun to think on whether the bank asks him for proof of an up-to-date firewall subscription, or somesuch, as with others apparently. It's also a shame he's likely to have alternative methods of payment, unlike some of us who fall foul of bank errors.

    Mine's the one with the banknotes and the fake moustache in the pocket ;)

  13. Rob

    @ AC - and others in the same vein

    "These fat-cat bankers have utter blind-faith in chip-n-pin. "

    Perhaps. But I suspect that you're thinking of C&P as a flawed anti-fraud technology. OTOH, it might make perfect sense to have faith in it as a risk transfer technology...

    And so on. Sometimes, it's a good idea to work out what exactly people are trying to do, before criticising them for doing something completely different badly.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Hmmm

    Dear Mr Bank manager,

    Are they going to hassle you to fill in claim forms, give you a receipt for the form then lose it while sending it to India to be processed, re-debit the money without telling you and forget to mention it when you phone in saying your account has been hacked again, making you cut up ANOTHER set of cards JUST as you were about to go shopping, eventually making you give up in disgust and open an account elsewhere????

    Not that this has ever happened to ME, you understand.......

    Mine the one with the bear traps in every pocket.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Dead Vulture

    Re: @ AC - and others in the same vein

    Spot on Rob. Modern banking is all about how to skim a profit of someone else's money without ever having any responsibility or duty of care. That is why the system is about to collapse, completely. Sadly it will take your savings and mine down with it.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re: 7000? That's... 2days wages

    I was thinking along the lines of 7000 pounds to him is like 50p to me, if he noticed he'd lost the equivalent of 50p he must be a real tight bastard. Oh, hang on, he's one of the top men at a bank so he must be.

  17. Steve

    2 down, 9 to go.

    Maybe someone just took that list of 11 banks and decided to some vigilante card fraud. It makes sense to target the biggest account there as they're less likely to miss the money.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    anyone else...

    does anyone else think that he will not have to jump through the same hoops the rest of us would to get this money back?

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Re: Re: @ AC - and others in the same vein

    'That is why the system is about to collapse, completely. Sadly it will take your savings and mine down with it.'

    Does that mean my overdraft etc will vanish as well??

  20. RainForestGuppy
    Go

    Identity text

    This is a classic:-

    http://www.articlesandtexticles.co.uk/2007/05/29/mitchell-webb-identity-theft/

    And so true.

  21. Matthew Hale

    Superb,

    Very good.

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    OT: Chip and Pin

    Why is there not a comment option for http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/21/pin_tampering_analysis/

    Jacques Erasmus, director of research at Prevx, recommends manufacturing see-through [chip and pin] terminals so that we can identify terminals which have been tampered with (typically involving Bluetooth tapping on doctored devices).

    What Jacques fails to realise, is we don't know what the inside of a chip and pin device should look like. Thus we cannot differentiate between a `standard` device and one which has been doctored. Furtermore, there's no such thing as a `standard` device, since they are produced by a handful of manufacturers, each of which will be designed differently.

  23. AC

    so when its a big boss ...

    you all laugh that some rich guy's been pwned but when it's average joe dave blogs in the street you want the fraudster hanged drawn and quartered.

    I laugh at anyone who gets beaten by fraud through the own stupidity but have every sympathy with anyone done due to the bank's stupidity which seems to be the case here.

    Just because he earns £1m doesn't mean it's "fair" that £7k is stolen from him.

    Fucking socialists.

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    this is slightly worrying

    not about him having money stolen, £7000 is probably pocket change, but that he's still making £1milling a year but letting go of hundreds of members of staff who only make a tiny fraction of that.

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Of course if he'd used verified by visa....

    ....oh no....wait a minute....

  26. Stephen Gray

    @ so when its a big boss ... AC

    ""Fucking socialists" yes we are so do try and keep up old boy, and its hung, drawn and quartered if you please...

  27. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re: so when its a big boss

    >Fucking socialists.

    At a risk of taking you seriously I think you're a bit mixed up. Socialists want everybody treated equally. They want this bloke to be interviewed by his bank manager, be accused of trying to defraud the bank, told it's his fault that the money went out of his account, be threatened with having the police called in, to fill in loads of forms, be told his claim has been rejected then go through the whole procedure a few times before the bank will admit the system it is using isn't infallible and he can have his money back in a few months time.

  28. Sooty

    @AC

    "I laugh at anyone who gets beaten by fraud through the own stupidity but have every sympathy with anyone done due to the bank's stupidity which seems to be the case here."

    As he actually runs the bank and is responsible for it, the banks stupdity could be considered, to be his own stupidity.

  29. Andy Dingley

    John Munden

    "interviewed by his bank manager"?

    This is HBOS, as in "Halifax". How about him serving some real prison time for being a victim of fraud? After all, it was good enough for John Munden

  30. J-Wick
    Thumb Up

    @ so when its a big boss ...

    It's the fact that he has ultimate responsibility for the systems & processes that allowed this to happen, and that his bank's policies make it extremely hard for those affected to get their money back. But of course it'll be easy for him.

    I would throw out the term 'irony' if I could be sure I was using the term absolutely 100% correctly (cos you lot would be extremely quick to let me know if not). However, I will throw out this term: 'schadenfreude'

  31. Jared Earle
    Coat

    @Stephen Gray

    No, it's "hanged, drawn and quartered".

    If you're going to be pedantic, it helps to be right. :)

    Mine's the one on the hook, in bits with its guts hanging out.

  32. Michael Dunn
    Coat

    @ Stephen Gray

    Well, Stephen - hung is the past tense and participle of what you do to game; hanged is the past tense and participle of what used to be done to criminals.

    Mine's the one with Fowler in the pocket.

  33. Stephen Gray

    By Jared Earle

    It does and I am right so there

    http://www.elizabethan-era.org.uk/elizabethan-executions.htm

  34. Stephen Gray

    For the hard of understanding

    http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/189300.html

  35. Michael Dunn

    Vicious and Vindictive behaviour

    I'v just been reading up on the John Munden case.

    The first trial accepted a report by - KPMG? The report indicated that HBOS's systems were fine - who were they run by? KPMG

    Just as farcical as the MOD asking Boeing if their FADEC system was reliable after the Mull of Kintyre Chinook crash: surprise, surprise, Boeing said it was!

    HBOS, of course, did not allow the defence team the access to audit their systems, as ordered by a judge, so the appeal succeeded.

    It is to be hoped that the bank will now pursue their own boss with the viciousness they displayed in the Munden case: presume he's guilty of fraud, of course. They could always get KPMG to cook up a suitable report!

    Don't bet on it.

  36. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    ROFL!

    I had to hand over a copy of my passport at a LLoyds TSB last year. Gave my passport for her to photocopy. She came back, looked at the photocopy, decided it wasn't good enough, crumpled it into a ball and threw it in the general direction of the bin. It landed on the floor. I asked for the crumpled ball and my passport back and told them to shove their account. The lessons haven't been learned clearly.

    All our institutions are disasters in the waiting like this, it's just the price of such failure is so high at banks. Feck 'em all.

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