In recent months we have seen a dramatic increase in customers who appear to be victims in what we believe to be romance scams. They are wiring money (thousands of dollars) to people they meet online and who usually reside outside of the United States. We have given it our best shot to inform these customers of our suspicions, and where required we have reported it as possible elder abuse. However, some people are just convinced the scam is real. I am wondering how other banks deal with this situation. Do you refuse to send the wires? Do you have the customer sign a hold harmless that you have informed them of the potential scam? Any comments related to this matter would be greatly appreciated.

We have seen these more frequently in the past year as well. We have found the best we can do is ask questions, try to help point out the holes in the stories, and provide resources describing these types of scams from the internet. In some cases, we have been able to search and find the exact form e-mails posted on scam sites, or even pictures of the customer's online love, listed on other sites with other names.

In the end, we're fairly successful, but it doesn't work all the time. We have refused to do the wires in some cases, but that generally just sends them to a Western Union or somewhere else to send it. It stinks. If the romance scam is military based, I've run across some options out there to report them or try to validate the supposed military member's identity which can help prove to your customer that it's a scam.

Our biggest problem has been people that are not only roped into these scams, but end up functioning as a money mule. They get funds into their account via ACH that were stolen from another account, then take them out and wire them off. We've had some decent sized losses when the ACH is pulled back as fraud. That's been the real wake-up call from some of our people, when they find out they owe us some big $$. (these are in the cases of ACH transfers that our customers initiate and pull from another financial) Enhanced monitoring of these activities, and a tightening of controls has helped stabilize that problem significantly, and while we continue to experience these problems, we've been able to detect and stop most of them in the recent past.

We had a woman come in wanting to send a wire to South America to her "fiancé" for some reason or another. We tried to convince her it was a scam and even came up with good proof but she had a good story and was convinced he loved her. We eventually wired the funds for her.

A few weeks later she came in to make a deposit and informed us that she had made a trip to see him and they are now married. We have no idea if it is real or fake but with a situation like this where they are now married it is hard to say anything when she wants to send money to him.

We noted our concerned and keep track of the account but so far we have no other evidence of fraud or abuse of the account.