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Abusive partners have found new and ‘nasty’ ways to target their victims:
It’s a bizarre and “nasty” new form of psychological abuse and thousands of Australians are doing it every day.
Commonwealth Bank has said it uncovered at least 8000 separate individuals sending threatening and abusive messages to people via its apps and online banking systems.
In one instance, CBA’s general manager of customer vulnerability Catherine Fitzpatrick told news.com.au, a single person sent their victim hundreds of abusive messages, one every few seconds, over a two-hour period.
[...] Ms Fitzpatrick spoke to news.com.au at the launch of a new initiative launched by CommBank that aims to support people impacted by domestic and family violence, including financial abuse.
[...] As part of CBA’s research prior to the program’s launch it found a number of its customers were being harassed by people during the process of sending them low value online payments, often as low as one cent.
[...] Most of us move money around online, say if we owe a mate some cash or to pay a bill. When you do, you usually have to write a description of what the transaction is that goes onto the statement of the person receiving the money.
“I might write ‘love mum’ if I’m sending something to my children, but these people will send abusive messages,” said Ms Fitzpatrick.
[...] Aside from the pain of receiving the message itself, some victims may, for example, need to rent a house and be forced to show a letting agency their bank statements meaning a complete stranger will see the messages.
“Its technology assisted abuse and it can be a precursor to financial abuse,” Ms Fitzpatrick said.
What laws does Australia have concerning threats and intimidation? In what other countries could this happen?
(Score: 1, Redundant) by looorg on Tuesday July 21 2020, @12:42AM (2 children)
I guess banks have to make some changes to how they process the memo lines, after all someone could be harassed or get their feelz hurt. That said it's a fairly stupid idea to send threats in the memo line since you just wrote it down so it's somewhat hard to deny it afterwards. But for the banks it might now be an issue if they want to process them or not, they are after all not needed for the transaction so it might be an issue of if they send them along, if they process them, if they censor them, if you as a customer want to receive them - possibly on a person by person basis. After all they can't just flat out ban transactions, if they could it would be a genius way of getting out of paying alimony or child support -- sorry your honor I really tried to but the bank must have blocked the payments. They can ban transactions naturally but it's a bit weird, and requires a bit more then someone being an asshole in the memo line.
If anything I guess it would be easier to just implement a minimum amount to process the order so people can't keep sending those $0.01 orders -- after all what are you ever going to buy or pay for that is worth a cent? (insert jokes here)
Not to mention that in case of threats you just created the evidence for your own conviction. Cause if someone takes a $2000 cheque and starts to send it one cent at the time you are clearly a fucking idiot that deserve all the crap that comes your way. It shouldn't be to hard to prove that you are harassing someone this way.
I think my bank used to do it back before internet banking, as in they didn't allow for any kind of unlimited amount of orders but they would just process 10 (or something around there) orders per month and after that they charged extra per order. So it shouldn't be to hard to set up those barriers again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2020, @07:36AM
Taxes owed by Google/Apple/Facebook/MS, based on their self-assessment.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Common Joe on Tuesday July 21 2020, @08:45AM
Based on two people I know who were harassed by their abusers after papers were filed in court (one going through a divorce and another who was raped), the courts and lawyers make it extremely hard to "prove" harassment like this -- even though a vegetable can clearly see from the evidence that it's harassment. On the rare chance that the abuser is punished, it's often a hand slap at most.
I'll add that although gender can play a role in who gets away with what, it's interesting that of the two people I have in mind, one is a guy and the other a gal. In my anecdotal examples, it seems that the court often likes to favor the abuser. On a broader scale, we can see harassment and abuse happening when large corporations screw the little guy.
It shouldn't be hard to prove, but it is. And it costs a lot of money.