James Coney: Why is it so easy for fraudsters to keep their bank accounts? | Money

I get hardly any text messages, but in the past fortnight I’ve had seven. Two were from HSBC asking me to authorise a new payee on my bank account. Two were from Royal Mail asking for a £2.99 postage fee for a parcel. The others were from Amazon, the census and DHL all wanting me to log on to a site that used their names.

I don’t have an HSBC account, I hadn’t ordered anything, and I’m pretty sure I filled out the census correctly. They were all, of course, scams. My wife’s phone is under a similar attack from this plague.

Scammers are ingenious, adaptable, inventive and relentless. Stopping them is not simple. We expect banks to solve this nationwide problem, but they are