Bob Sullivan

By any measure you can find, fraud is soaring in the U.S. and around the world.  I spent an hour on WHYY radio recently discussing the causes for this, but I can boil it down to one concept: big, uncaring companies have dehumanized customers and employees alike, creating a perfect playground for criminal mischief.

I write a lot of stories that reveal how much systems let people down and set them up to be victims of crimes. You’ll often hear me lament that big tech companies or financial institutions don’t do more to stop crimes.

Today, I have a different story to tell at The Perfect Scam podcast. It’s about a crime that *almost* happened, but didn’t — thanks in large part to well-trained bank employees who followed a well-designed system…with care.  But there’s another important element to this near-miss crime that plays a huge role: It happened in a small community, at a small bank, where employees had a personal connection to the victim.  Like this:

“The young man who is an assistant manager up there went to high school with at least one of my grandsons.”

And this:

“The lady at the bank, the one who was the person who called me initially, my son had a coffee truck in Rogersville for about a year and a half, and this bank manager loved his coffee. So she had come through his line so many times, and so knew me because of that.”

It’s human nature: When you know someone, or you know someone you know will know someone, you are far more likely to step in and ask questions when something seems amiss. After all, who could go to bed at night knowing they helped criminals steal $25,000 from an 83-year-old woman who is a pillar of the community?

I realize I’m telling this story upside down, giving you the punchline without the setup. That’s because the punchline *is* the story here. It’s the only part of this story which is a surprise. The rest follows an all-too-familiar refrain. Listen for yourself by clicking here. But here’s the setup.

Samuel, the would-be victim, has lived in this small town outside Springfield, Mo., for most of her 83 years.  She got a menacing call from someone claiming he was from a federal agency investigating a crime, and he needed her help.  Many calls later, Samuel was manipulated into a bank visit where she would ask for $25,000 to be wired to a nonexistent company.  But the teller and manager 1 asked so many questions that Samuel left without the money and headed for another branch.  By the time she got there, the bank had already put an alert on her account, and tellers put up multiple speed bumps. Ditto for branch No. 3.  Critically, bank employees did this with kindness, not dismissiveness or ageism, because the criminal had warned Samuel that a bank employee was “in on it.”  As I’ve written elsewhere, rudeness only pushes victims into the arms of criminals, who are very good at sounding compassionate.

The bank also thoughtfully notified Samuel’s children, who are also named on her account. The kids got mom off the phone with the criminal, got her home, and eventually persuaded her that she was talking to a criminal.  The whole episode was over in a couple of days, and the family didn’t lose a dime.

As a show of thanks, Samuel made banana bread and took some to each bank employee who played a role in foiling the crime.

I love a happy ending. And I love banana bread. I’m only half kidding when I suggest in this episode that baked goods are the answer to America’s fraud problems.  What I’m suggesting, of course, is that the human touch is missing from most cybersecurity initiatives.  We spend billions on software…we’re calling it AI now…. but we overlook the front-line workers who are often the difference between disaster and a close call.

I realize Linda Samuel’s story has a unique set of circumstances.  Many of us don’t live in a town where we can walk or quickly drive to a small, community bank.  Years of industry consolidation have ensured that.  In many cases, we only have a choice of one or two gigantic banks.  This is a mistake, and if you’re curious about the problem of hyper-consolidation and monopoly power, I’d invite you to visit the American Economic Liberties Project and the work of Matt Stoller, author of the “BIG” Substack newsletter.

For now, suffice to say it’s unlikely Linda Samuel’s story would have had the same ending if her money had been parked at Bank of Gigantica.

I do know many, many cybersecurity workers at these large institutions who care a lot about fraud, and often write code that stops crimes. When I have a chance to speak to tech worker audiences, I often remind them that no firefighter wins an award for a house fire that is stopped because a fire inspection forced a safety upgrade — the work these individuals do can be just as invisible and thankless, so I thank them for it.

But I’ll repeat myself — poor customer service is our greatest cybersecurity vulnerability.  This story makes that point by showing the alternative: good customer service can be our best crime-fighting tool.

We’re never going to get a handle on fraud unless banana bread, once again, is part of the equation.  Know Your Customer shouldn’t be a check box on a compliance form.  It should be standard operating procedure.   And it’s worth the investment.