The Skellefteå resident received an SMS from a fraudster. He was asked to get a new BankID, and lost his money.
A Skellefteå man received a text message that he understood to be from one of the major banks in Sweden. The message was that he needed to renew his mobile BankID by following the link in the text message. But when he did this, a fraudster was able to access his account and drain it of all his savings - a total of 303,184 kronor.
The story could have ended here. In previous, similar cases, the consumer has often had to bear the entire loss themselves.
But since November 2022, the National Board for Consumer Complaints, ARN, has drawn up new recommendations for fraud involving sums of over 12,000 kronor. ARN now recommends that banks should refund most of the savings that fraud victims lost.
In this particular case, ARN believes that the bank concerned should compensate the man with 195,000 kronor. According to ARN, the man had no particular reason to question the authenticity of the text message. Among other things, the fraudster had "spoofed" his phone number, which means that it appeared to be a number belonging to the bank.
However, the bank concerned opposes all demands for repayment. In a response to ARN, the bank writes that the man has "acted in a way that is not only to be considered grossly negligent but also particularly reprehensible in the sense of the law". Furthermore, the bank writes:
"When he signed the download of a new BankID, he received a clear warning message informing him of the action he was about to sign, together with a request never to carry out the same at the request of the bank or anyone else, for any reason."
The man explained that everything happened very quickly and that he did not have time to perceive any such warning information. But ARN also believes that he acted grossly negligently on this particular point. Therefore, the bank is recommended to "only" compensate him with part of the sum lost.
It is worth noting that ARN's recommendations are never binding. The bank therefore has no obligation to follow the recommendation - even though the majority of companies usually do. In order to obtain a potentially binding decision, a case must be taken to the district court.