Elderly relative scammed on the phone

An elderly relative fell for a microsoft scam over the phone. She let them in remotely to her laptop and then they asked her to key in her visa debit details. She didn't realise they could see what she was typing. €297 debited from the account before she went to the bank the following morning to ask had anything been debited.

It was a visa debit card on a current account. The bank have said she can't get the money refunded. It's an EBS account. Is this correct. I would have thought that an unauthorised transaction could be returned as she never authorised anyone to debit anything from her account. Could anyone offer any advice. She's usually fairly clued in and couldn't believe she fell for it.

She was negligent with her information.

It's her fault, and not the bank's.

It's tough, but it's her fault.

Has she asked the bank do a chargeback ?

Thanks for the replies. No I don't think she's asked for a chargeback. Someone mentioned a chargeback to me and I'm just googling the information on that now. The card was a debit card with EBS which is provided by Mastercard. I think I'll go over and go down to the branch with her or get her to phone mastercard when I'm with her as I know she won't push it. Although she was negligent, which she accepts, it's still an unauthorised transaction for goods or services which she didn't receive.

Just an update on this. She went into the branch this morning and requested a Chargeback Form. The staff had never heard of it so have requested one from head office. In the middle of the conversation, the manager came over and said, no one had ever requested a mastercard chargeback form from them. It's worth a shot anyway.

sahd said:

The banks really should be ashamed that they didn't mention this - what kind of training do they get? If you don't get any joy - you can always go to the Financial Ombudsman.

PS - It may be a good idea for your Aunt to get that card cancelled just in case the scammers try and use it again - which may be possible if they saw the expiry date and security code when she typed it. (The bank should really have doen this anyway)

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Thanks sahd. Yes, the card was cancelled that morning when she went into the branch. Today, the manager also said to her, that the process of getting the refund was already happening, totally different to what they said initially. All very strange. Anyway, her laptop has been cleaned down also. I went into her hotmail account and there's an email sent from it, saying she was happy with the service blah blah. Obviously not sent by her, as when you go into the activity log, you could see the account was accessed three times from India over the course of a couple of hours. It gave the location in India and the IP address. Password changed on that now also.

I think you need to change the password on every service that computer has ever been used for