Does the victim of a phishing scam deserve our sympathy, or that of his financial institutions? Readers had differing reactions to a recent Weblog item about a bank wanting to be reimbursed for the overdraft protection on a phishing victim’s cleaned-out account.
Some readers sided with the bank’s argument that the phishing victim "gave permission" to the criminals posing as PayPal to drain his account. "You cannot expect the banks to refund money that you willingly sent to somebody else," wrote one reader. "If the recipient is here in the U.S., you've got a chance. But explain to me how the customer service reps at the bank are supposed to track down a scammer in the former Soviet republic? Buyer beware! Make sure you know where your money is going!"
Other readers disagreed. "That's almost like saying if I was walking down the street and was hit by a stray bullet, the fault was mine because I knew there were crazy people out there with guns and I shouldn't have been walking down the street," one reader responded. "I am tired of seeing the victims blamed for crimes that are committed by criminals! The absurdity of this premise is becoming more prevalent the older I get....wait, maybe it's my fault because I'm getting older ..."
Some argued quite passionately that those who are fooled by deceptive spam must bear all the burden. "The phishee responded to the spam, without verifying its validity," wrote one reader. "The sucker thus neglected due diligence, the legal obligation to check an offer before accepting it. Anyone who voluntarily responds to a spam must be considered to have volunteered for whatever the spammer has in mind. If the spammers' suckers are to be protected from their own voluntary actions at cost to all the rest of us, we might as well give up on e-mail, because the spammers have won."
But still others warned that anyone can play the fool. "Go ahead and call them suckers or rubes or whatever you want, but they are victims, period," wrote another reader. "Yeah, you may be so much smarter than them, but they didn't do anything wrong. I'm so tired of the ‘too-bad-that's-what-they-get’ mentality. If you feel like that, wait until it happens to you or to someone you care about. Gonna tell your grandmother who just lost everything, ‘Hey, it's your fault, Granny’?"
11:26:21 AM 
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