stustaff said:
One little thing keeps bugging me.
People keep saying no wonder the bank froze the account they wouldnt want to take on this amount of risk for a product that doesnt exist etc.
But it isnt Craigs bank that would be assuming the risk! it would be the individual card providers, If i pre ordered a product with my barclay card and the product never arrives it would be Barclays that give me the money back not the bank that barclay sent the money too.
this is why to me anyway a lot of the reasons being guessed at dont seem quite right...
Banks are, as I believe is well known, a bunch of thieving bar tenders. Yes - your Barclays bank would refund you - but you can bet your last penny that they will do their very best to extract whatever they pay you from someone else - and OpenPandora's bank would be an obvious next choice.
I was enjoying an article on the BBC News channel the other day where a banking representative was defending the fact that banks are leery of giving credit at the moment, and the reporter repeatedly tried to get them to answer whether the bank would actually pay the amounts that were defaulted or whether they were covered by insurance. The banker eventually admitted that they wouldn't be out of pocket themselves directly but that wasn't the point - the point was to avoid situations where chargebacks and defaults and so on occurred - to be more fiscally responsible.
Banks may insure you, but (except when they are being exceptionally greedy and overconfident) they turn right around an lay the liability off on someone else. Craigs bank, being a bunk of thieving bar stuards themselves, know full well that if OpenPandora vanish with a million and a half pounds having not provided the goods, that a million and a half pounds worth of vengeance from other banks will be visited upon them. And other banks/credit card companies DO have the funds to pay for great lawyers, where we (individually, at least) do not.
Of course, this doesn't say that the speculations about why the banks have/did/might have been silly are TRUE - but certainly HSBC could be exposed to considerable potential risk from masses of credit card orders.