Robbed of 23 thousand euros, saved for years, with a phone call lasting a few minutes . It happened, last year, to a 48-year-old woman from Alghero who answered with her cell phone, on July 17, to a known number: that of her bank .
The request of the alleged operator, insistent, is to uninstall the credit institution's application because it has been stopped for too long. But once the operation is completed , two days later, at the end of the 48 hours communicated as necessary for the restoration, the woman realizes that all her money has disappeared , evaporated from the account. The bank assures that none of the employees has looked for her for the app and the scam emerges in all its drama, given that the lady, mother of two daughters and without support checks, no longer knows how to go on.
He then turns to the lawyer Elisa Lombardo who asks for the refund of the missing amount, without success, and a copy of the inquiry logs, the computer data of the transfers on the victim's account, receiving a refusal here too. The lawyer responds by presenting an injunction to the court of Sassari to get back at least the seconds and the judge allows it by sentencing the bank to pay a fine of 2 thousand euros plus fees for a total of 3600. Very little compared to those 23 thousand euros on which the battle now begins, unfortunately common to many savers defrauded in these cases : where does the responsibility of the customer, who fell for the trap, and that of the bank, for failure to check the anomalies of the financial transfers, begin?
For the credit institution , the blame in this case lies with the woman for having "followed with culpable credulity the instructions of a so-called operator" . It is also true, as the lawyer Lombardo underlined in the appeal to the Board of Financial Banking Arbitrators, that banks must follow stringent controls based on European regulations. And now the same body has assigned the first round to the 48-year-old, recognizing her 4,450 euros in compensation . An initial step that will be followed by others, this time in court, for a case that could act as a trailblazer for many others. In the meantime, the advice is to never follow suspicious phone calls like the one the woman was the victim of.
