Man lured by fake Robert Abela video lost €70,000 in eight days – BOV should have stepped in, court rules

In the space of eight days in November 2023, a 45-year-old man saw around €70,000 of his life savings drain from his BOV accounts.

Just weeks before, he had neither a Revolut account, nor the BOV mobile banking app. His closest brush with banking was using his visa card to withdraw the odd €100. In nearly two years, he had dipped into the account his salary was paid into just twice, for €20 and €250.

The man had seen a Facebook video of the prime minister and a journalist appearing to promote an investment scheme. Enticed, he clicked the link and put in an initial €260.

Soon after, he was put in touch with a “trader” on WhatsApp.

What happened next bore the hallmarks of what is known as a pig-butchering scam, in which fraudsters spend days or weeks “fattening up” a victim with friendship and trust before going in for the kill.

The scammer struck up a friendship with the 45-year-old, talking to him about horses and buying property in Malta. Before long, he had won the man over and money began to flow out.

Last Wednesday, BOV lost its appeal against a ruling that says it must partly compensate the 45-year-old for the funds siphoned off his accounts.

The Court of Appeal said that the bank had failed in its duty to monitor the man’s payments and flag that something was badly amiss.

He is far from the only one to be taken in. Deepfake videos of the Prime Minister have become a favoured lure for scammers.

Last year, a woman told a court she had lost her life savings of more than €53,000 after falling for a similar video featuring Robert Abela. A 24-year-old Ukrainian woman has been charged in connection with that scam and is pleading not guilty.

Remote access and high-pressure tactics

For the scam to work, the ‘trader’ would call him on WhatsApp and tell him to fire up AnyDesk, a legitimate app which IT technicians commonly use. However, it is also a favourite tool of scammers, as it hands over control of a phone or computer to anyone accessing it remotely. Then the pair would chat while the trader ‘worked’.

Whenever a payment needed authorising, the bank would text him a security code. “I would receive them and hand them to the trader,” the man testified. “I’d tell him what the number was.”

When the bank questioned him about raising his daily limits, he did as he was coached. “The bank asked me some questions. I told them what the trader told me to answer.”

Messages between the two show the fraudster egging him to pay €20,000 in so-called tax before his “profits” could be released.

“Who’s going to give me €20,000?” the man asked.

“It will be back in two hours time,” the scammer assured him. “Fiancee or mom or dad?”

When he took his case to the Arbiter for Financial Services, the man complained he had been fleeced through AnyDesk, and pointed the finger at the bank for failing in its obligation to monitor and stop fraudulent transactions.

The scammers, he said, would ring him up to 15 times a day, badgering him to raise his daily limits.

Yet the bank, he said, never really pressed him — a man who had never dabbled in cryptocurrency — on why he was suddenly making such payments.

Only €5,000 of the money made its way back into his accounts.

Bank defence and court findings

BOV, for its part, said the man had never raised any alarm. The bank would send him a text message after every transaction, and each payment had cleared its 3D Secure checks.

After he complained, the bank said, it opened chargeback disputes, but the foreign banks refused to cough up. In the end, only €5,000 of the money ever made its way back into his accounts

The man had been free to invest his money wherever he pleased, BOV argued, and could not expect the bank to shoulder the blame for his choices.

BOV was appealing last November’s decision by the Arbiter for Financial Services.

In that decision, the Arbiter found that the bank had been asleep at the wheel. It had failed to monitor and guard against the fraudulent payments bleeding out of the man’s accounts, and had not warned him that something smacked of fraud.

The figures spoke for themselves. The man earned around €1,900 a month. In just two days, €50,000 left his accounts, more than double his annual salary. Most of the money had gone to Revolut and crypto platforms Binance and Bifinity.

As for Revolut, the Arbiter said the circumstances showed the transfers were merely a stepping stone to crypto, and should have raised the bank’s eyebrows.

But the Arbiter also said the 45-year-old was far from blameless, having handed a stranger the keys to his phone.

Of the eight payments made after the point the bank should have stepped in, worth €37,130 in all, BOV was ordered to refund half of six and the full value of the last two. That comes to €19,630.

Appeal dismissed by judge

At the time, the Arbiter also seized on the case to sound the alarm. Banks, he said, must invest in effective payment monitoring to tackle “this scourge of fraud on victims who fall into scammers’ traps”.

There was an “immediate need”, he said, for contact-centre staff to be trained to sniff out fraud, especially when clients make “strange requests” to raise their limits. Banks, he said, should invest in AI systems that can hold suspicious payments in real time.

BOV appealed on ten grounds. Among them, it said the man “thought he would make some gain by being dishonest in his answers” to the bank, and “had every intention of defrauding the bank” by following the scammer’s instructions.

The man said that was “unfounded, speculative and slanderous”.

The bank also took umbrage at the Arbiter’s recommendations, arguing that they strayed beyond his remit.

Judge Lawrence Mintoff was not swayed.

He said he found it hard to believe that a 45-year-old today could not use Revolut. But that did not absolve the bank. BOV had accepted the man’s explanations at face value, the judge said, even as he “literally emptied” his accounts of sums far beyond his annual salary.

Nor did the bank do itself any favours. When it was asked for the recordings of the man’s calls requesting higher limits, BOV said they did not exist. Its recording server had been faulty throughout the last quarter of 2023.

And it could hardly claim to have been in the dark about the dangers. In July 2023, just months before the scam, BOV had announced it was rolling out a new AI system to catch abnormal activity. In its decision, the Arbiter had quoted one of its officials’ words back at the bank: “It’s about recognising patterns.”

As for BOV’s complaint that the law sets no time frame for monitoring, the judge said “real time” speaks for itself. Had the bank’s systems kicked in as they should have, he said, the man would likely have lost only the first €5,000.

“It is certainly not acceptable that repeated behaviour, evidently anomalous and outside the client’s typical patterns, is not flagged in any way,” he said.

The Arbiter’s recommendations, he added, were simply advice for the bank to consider, “for the good of all parties involved”.

The only point BOV won was on interest, which will now run from the date of the appeal judgment. The bank must foot the bill for the appeal.