Misselling

If I train my spam filter in advance to reject any mention of “Payment Protection”, will I be spared a forthcoming wave of phishing spam?

Our Financial Services Authority – the ones who sat around playing with trivia while the banks printed money noone was ever going to make – are at it again.  They’ve found another misselling scandal (payment protection insurance) and want the banks to review all PPI customers – including those who are perfectly happy with it – and invite them to claim compensation.

You can be sure the phishers will be happier about this than the banks, and will be eagerly contacting a lot more people than the banks even know about.

Every time there’s a new misselling+compensation scandal, I get mildly irritated: I should’ve taken the carrot, enjoyed the benefits, with the backing of compensation.  They’re penalising the prudence that steered me away from, for example, Icesave’s market-beating interest rate on savings (which I avoided in 2005 because the risk of losing it seemed far too high).

Now if only they’d deal with our elephants in the room: historic pension promises and fantasyland mortgages.  If I’d taken that bubble-mortgage in 2005 I could be enjoying not one but two government bailouts right now (zero interest rates and SMI).  Instead, I’m just paying for them.  Grrrr ….