Millions stolen, death threats: Should banks do more to fight ‘pig butchering'?

Mint

4 days ago

For nearly 50 years, Anamarie Hurt trusted her husband, Craig, to manage their finances. And he did a good job of it, making investments that grew into a comfortable nest egg.
Then Craig walked into a bank in Tulsa, Okla., and began moving their retirement funds into cryptocurrency investments that turned out to be fake. A year later, after losing more than $5 million, the Hurts' life savings were gone.
At first, Anamarie's anger was directed at Craig. But it soon found another target: the bank that she said helped him send wires as high as $300,000 at a time to scammers.
Now that investment scams, sometimes called pig butchering, are booming global operations, some Americans are demanding their banks and financial advisers do more to prevent the scams from happening. Pressure is also spreading to telecoms and social-media platforms such as Facebook, where scammers find their marks.
In 2023, Anamarie sued Arvest Bank, the Arkansas-based regional lender that processed Craig's wire payments. Similar lawsuits have sprung up around the country, seeking damages from the likes of JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo and alleging they didn't do enough to investigate their customer's suspicious behavior or to block payments to scammers.
A lawyer for Arvest, which hasn't publicly responded to the Hurts' claims, declined to comment on the lawsuit. The dispute is now in arbitration.
Operating from compounds in Southeast Asia and West Africa, criminal gangs have mastered the art of building trust with victims—or fattening up their 'pigs." Scammers cultivate romantic connections with victims while posing as savvy investors with knowledge about how to strike it rich. Victims are often elderly or otherwise vulnerable, and many end up losing their life savings.
The scams have put banks in a difficult position. If banks don't try to stop fraudulent payments, victims and their advocates argue, scammers will continue extracting tens of billions or more each year from vulnerable Americans.
But holding payments and trying to talk victims out of being scammed, as some states now allow, can provoke a backlash from customers. Bankers argue that they already have their hands full trying to thwart money laundering, terrorist financing and other types of fraud and have put considerable resources into such efforts. They say they can't be expected to protect their customers from making ill-advised decisions.
Those who sue their banks face an uphill battle. Federal law requires banks to reimburse people whose credit cards are stolen or who have their accounts infiltrated by fraudsters. But there's little protection for the growing ranks of Americans who are tricked into turning over their money.
For Anamarie, the episode has come with one haunting twist after another. As she worked to get to the bottom of what happened, she faced death threats from scammers, who repeatedly told Craig they would track down and kill him and his wife if he didn't comply with their requests. 'Look I'm given you 1 hour to send my money to my wallet otherwise I don't mind spending extra money driving down to your house and gun you and your f—ing wife down instantly and nothing will happen," one message said.
The scammers also tried to blackmail Anamarie, sending her photos Craig had taken of her in the shower at their behest and without Anamarie's consent.
She also made unsettling discoveries about Craig, the person she thought she knew better than anyone—including a medical issue that helped explain why he was vulnerable to the scam and why his judgment deteriorated so quickly.
In August 2022, Anamarie was shopping at Walmart when her credit cards were declined. When she brought up the issue at home, Craig said he would take care of it. But Anamarie was worried. 'Are you being scammed?" she finally asked him.
Flustered, Craig admitted it was possible.
They went to the police, where Anamarie, in shock, started understanding the severity of the situation. She and her sister would spend months unraveling what had happened and learning the extent of the damage.
A year or so earlier, Craig had responded to an online ad about investments and later received a text message from someone calling themself Tiffany, according to his hazy account. The person struck up a flirtatious exchange and was soon telling him about a lucrative opportunity. All he needed to do was wire money from his bank account.
Craig's early efforts to wire money to scammers had raised alarm bells at the Bank of Oklahoma, where the Hurts had banked for their entire marriage, Anamarie would learn. The bank closed Craig's accounts after he made at least one suspicious payment. Another bank where he opened an account quickly did the same.
Banks have a legal obligation to screen for and report potential money laundering activity by their customers. If a customer continues to engage in suspicious activity, banks will sometimes close the account.
The law that requires banks to report suspicious money laundering activity was passed in 1970. Later that decade, as electronic payments such as debit cards and ATMs became ubiquitous, Congress also passed a law requiring banks to screen for fraudulent activity and reimburse customers for stolen funds.
Fraud, however, was defined by lawmakers at the time as an unauthorized transfer—meaning when a criminal impersonated a customer or got access to an account without the customer's help. The pig-butchering scams of today often slip through the cracks of banks' anti-money laundering and fraud detection programs, since victims are tricked by scammers into authorizing the fraudulent transactions themselves.
Craig plays fetch with his dog, Joy.Family photos at the Hurts' home.
In April 2021, Craig landed at Arvest, opening a checking account at a branch a five-minute drive from the Hurts' home. There he began sending more wires to the scammers, starting with a payment of $25,000 and quickly escalating to larger amounts.
Craig sent the wires in-person and with the help of Arvest employees, according to the Hurts' lawsuit. To fund the transfers, he liquidated the Hurts' retirement funds at Raymond James. He also drained his mother's trust and, after being told he need to pay additional fees to access his fake investment earnings, the funds from a $350,000 home-equity loan on the Hurts' home.
Anamarie's lawsuit would later cite the federal anti-money-laundering laws that require banks to screen for suspicious activity. Despite what the suit calls obvious red flags, such as the size of the transfers and the suspicious names of the recipients, the Arvest employees who assisted Craig didn't investigate his wire payments or alert Anamarie, whose name was on the account.
Those failures constituted a form of legal negligence, Anamarie's lawyers argued. They also questioned Arvest's approval of the home-equity loan, because taking out such a loan usually requires signatures from all owners of the residence. But Anamarie hadn't known about the loan and didn't sign any documents for it, according to her suit.
Other lawsuits by scam victims accuse banks of failing to sufficiently vet bank accounts opened by scammers to launder pig-butchering funds or cite state laws, including a California statute that allows victims to bring suit against institutions or individuals who assist in elder abuse. In an ongoing lawsuit there, an 80-year-old widow named Alice Lin has accused JPMorgan Chase and several of its employees of aiding pig-butchering scammers who defrauded her of nearly her entire life savings.
Lin, who hadn't sent a wire transfer in more than six years, was scammed into wiring $720,000 over the course of three weeks, according to the suit. In a victory for Lin, a federal judge last year denied a motion by JPMorgan to dismiss the case.
A JPMorgan spokesman said the bank disputes her claims and that employees warned her the payments would be irreversible.
During the Hurts' visit to the police in 2022, an officer told Anamarie to get power of attorney over Craig. The next day Craig refused to go along with it and threatened to kill himself. She sought psychiatric help for Craig, and got a court to appoint her his legal guardian. The Hurts don't have children.
At Arvest just days later, Anamarie and her sister discovered that only a few hundred dollars remained in the Hurts' checking account.
'Oh, we know Craig," Anamarie recalled the bank manager saying. 'He's in here all the time."
In some states, a bank like Arvest might have been able to pause the payments that Craig was making, and been required to report his behavior to authorities or make a reasonable attempt to contact Anamarie or another family member.
That wasn't the case in Oklahoma. The state has some requirements for investment advisers and broker-dealers such as Raymond James, but none for banks—often the last stop before a victim's money is sent to scammers and lost forever. For joint accounts, banks aren't typically required to notify another account holder of any suspicious withdrawals.
More than 20 states do have laws that provide banks with a safe harbor from legal action for delaying transactions if they suspect a client is the victim of financial exploitation. More than 40 have a similar safe harbor for investment professionals such as broker-dealers.
Many—but not all—of the state laws specifically apply to clients over the age of 60 or 65. In some cases, the laws also require a report to state authorities or permit banks to contact a trusted third party such as a family member.
Anamarie searches through binders of credit card statements and bank statements.
In Alabama, safe harbor rules have allowed the state to prevent millions of dollars from being siphoned from seniors, said Amanda Senn, director of the state's securities regulator. A rule enabling investment professionals to delay a payment for up to 25 days went into effect in 2016, and a parallel safe harbor for banks was created in 2021.
Banks and financial advisers have filed a growing number of reports of potential exploitation since Alabama created the twin rules. The Alabama Securities Commission received 37 reports in the first full fiscal year after the first rule went into effect. In its most recent fiscal year, the commission received 319.
'Financial professionals are looking out for their customers, but it's getting increasingly harder for everyone," said Senn.
Calls for federal legislation that addresses banks' responsibilities around elder fraud and investment scams have been growing. Last year, Democrats in Congress introduced a bill that would have expanded the 1970s era fraud laws and forced banks to cover losses in cases where consumers are tricked into sending payments.
Some industry representatives have argued for regulatory guidance that would allow banks to better share information with each other about customers impacted by scammers.
Plaintiffs' lawyers and victim advocates have also pushed states to go further than current hold laws, which allow banks to delay transactions if they wish, by requiring banks to do so if they have a reasonable suspicion of fraud.
Last year, California's legislature voted to pass a law that would have required banks and other businesses to create an emergency contact program and delay suspicious transactions for elderly account holders age 65 or older. The California Bankers Association opposed the legislation, arguing that banks were 'ill-equipped to second-guess their customers' decision," and the bill was eventually vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
'The argument is that it's the customer who's doing it," said Ken Palla, a financial security expert and former director at MUFG Union Bank. 'It's their money, and they can direct us where to send it."
Victims can be adamant and refuse to believe family members or authorities who tell them they are being scammed. 'They really wrap these people around the axle," Palla said.
Craig and Anamarie head upstairs to Craig's den, where he spends much of his time.
On at least one occasion, Craig upbraided an Arvest customer-service representative over the phone after he was questioned about a suspicious $1,000 Zelle payment, according to a recording of the call reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The representative told Craig it was a red flag that the name on the Zelle account where he was trying to send money didn't match the name in the email address he was given. Craig's Zelle account had been frozen as a result.
'I don't need an overseer," Craig responded. 'If you don't want to do it, just cancel the transaction, and I'll do it somewhere else."
The Arvest representative ultimately declined to unfreeze the account, according to the recording. 'You can get employee of the year," Craig told him sarcastically.
Shortly after discovering the scam, Anamarie learned something else about Craig that helped explain what had happened. His doctor told her that Craig had vascular dementia, likely due to a brain injury from a fall he took in 2015 while walking his brother-in-law's dog.
Someone with vascular dementia can be completely articulate and appear normal to their friends and family, but also be impaired in their ability to assess risk and make decisions. Anamarie had been aware of the injury, but was under the impression that Craig had mostly recovered after being given medication.
Her lawyers also uncovered more about how scammers manipulated Craig into wresting control of his funds from his longtime financial adviser at Raymond James. The adviser had repeatedly tried to convince Craig that 'Tiffany" was scamming him, to no avail. While Oklahoma doesn't have a law enabling banks to pause transactions, it does provide a safe harbor for broker-dealers to do so.
Around August 2021, Raymond James's compliance department placed restrictions on Craig's accounts and alerted the state's adult protective services agency about his behavior, according to emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and a person familiar with the matter.
But Craig still insisted on withdrawing money from his Raymond James accounts for fake cryptocurrency investments. Eventually he moved his funds to a Fidelity brokerage account, where they were cashed out and transferred to Arvest.
'You do not want to be the one who effectuated his request for a scam and likely immense loss—let him do it elsewhere," a compliance executive told Craig's financial adviser in an email. 'We all tried our best to help him."
Whether the firm fully alerted Anamarie is unclear. Anamarie said she recalls one phone conversation with their adviser at Raymond James but said the adviser was vague and that the call left her confused. The adviser said he fully informed Anamarie of what was happening.
In an email following that call, she told the adviser that she had confronted Craig about whether he was being scammed after coming home and finding him on the phone transferring funds from Fidelity. 'I cannot convince him he's being scammed…He has it in his head he knows what he's doing," Anamarie wrote.
She said she later forgot about the email and the incident and that to her knowledge adult protective services never reached out. Oklahoma Human Services declined to comment and said all cases are confidential. Raymond James still manages a separate IRA fund that is solely owned by Anamarie.
In the months that followed the Hurts' visit to the police station, the scammers proved reluctant to let go of Craig. They infiltrated their devices, revealing on one occasion that they knew Anamarie's exact location: 'Right now you at the dance at the senior center."
Anamarie eventually took Craig's phone away completely. For a year, she slept with her laptop, phone and wallet under her pillow so he couldn't get hold of them.
The arbitration with Arvest is scheduled to take place later this year. Other lawsuits against banks have faced dismissal or been settled on undisclosed terms, which has the effect of preventing the suits from creating legal precedent.
Thanks to Anamarie's measures, Craig's behavior has normalized somewhat. He has stopped trying to sneak off to local convenience stores to buy gift cards for women he is chatting with online. He now sleeps for 18-20 hours a day, Anamarie said, often in the recliner where he still searches for his phone.
He has never apologized about the damage he caused, Anamarie said. Given the opportunity, he seems to think he could make everything right, she said, saying he has told her, 'All I need is one more investment."
Write to Dylan Tokar at [e-mail]