14 DAY TRIAL // Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, Westpac and NAB are being sued by an Australian woman who believes they are to blame because they wouldn't help her stop her minor son who was running a hundred thousand dollar scam selling fake products on eBay.
According to The Sydney Morning Herald, the boy started commercializing fictive electronic products on eBay in 2007 when he was only 14. After his mother came on to the scheme, she alerted the financial institutions, urging them to shut down his bank accounts, but they refused to do so, thus allegedly taking part in the money laundering operation her boy was running.
By the time law enforcement agencies picked up his trail, he was already running another banking operation that was bringing him large earnings.
''He began placing small amounts of cash on his many debit cards, followed by instant large withdrawals. The flaw in the system is that you can go $1500 overdrawn before they shut down the account. He didn't care. The moment one got closed, it was his cue to open another. It became an addiction,'' the woman revealed.
She claims that she tried in many occasions to stop her child's massive shopping sprees by contacting the representatives of the companies from where he made large purchases, but they all stated that the banks are the only ones who can do anything about the situation.
Even though she handed her son over to the police many times, each time he got out of juvenile detention centers he kept on going with the illegal plots.
“Once he'd become 'Mr Popular', his biggest fear was that everyone would desert him if the cash dried up. Today of course most of those so-called friends have disappeared because they were hangers-on. It's destroyed him,” the desperate mother said.
Now, she believes that the financial institutions could have easily stopped him if they only would have listened.
It will be interesting to see what will happen, but I expect that the lack of proper legislation will make the trial long and controversial.
It's clearly difficult to determine whose fault this is. Are the banks to blame? Is the boy's mother the one responsible for the youth's actions? It will remain to be seen.