Every month, thousands of abusive and coercive messages are being sent in the reference fields of bank payments. Now, banks want abusers to know: ”We can see you.” Kate Newton reports.
“im sorry” reads one message.
A few days later: “i miss u”.
They keep coming: “can we talk?”
The sender is relentless. Nearly 40 messages amass over six months, showing up every three or four days. They alternate between pleading the female recipient to get in touch, telling her the sender misses her, and referencing their sexual history.
These aren’t texts, emails, or Facebook messages. Instead, a couple of times a week, the sender transfers a few cents to the woman’s bank account and includes messages in the reference fields.
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The references aren’t abusive. They don’t contain direct threats. Apart from one message, there aren’t even any profanities.
Sent with the consent of both people, as part of a normal relationship, the transactions could be harmless; maybe even romantic.
But Holly Carrington, a policy adviser at domestic abuse charity Shine, says the tone and frequency of the transactions suggest a different scenario: these are communications sent by someone who has been blocked from every other method of contact.
“Picture if you will, you’re in a relationship where you’ve experienced a range of abusive and controlling tactics over a period of time, and you’re trying to separate from this person,” Carrington says.
“You might get a message that says: ‘I love you, I miss you’. People might read that and go, ‘Oh, that’s sweet’. What that’s actually saying is, ‘I can still get to you’.”
While society is becoming increasingly aware of other types of coercive control – like isolating women from friends and family, or controlling them financially or emotionally – the phenomenon of “transaction abuse” is something banks here and overseas are only just beginning to grapple with.
The potential for misusing the reference fields in bank transactions is obvious to anyone who has included a silly reference when they’re paying a friend or relative back; the difference lies in the intent.
“People can be quite creative in finding ways to control, harass and abuse their partners or former partners, so it doesn’t surprise me that people have discovered this way of doing it,” Carrington says.
Kathryn George/Stuff
Family violence isn’t always a scene from Once Were Warriors. More often, it’s about men controlling women, sometimes without physical abuse at all. (Video first published in September 2020)
Thousands of concerning transactions uncovered
The messages above were among more than 10,000 potentially concerning transaction references that New Zealand’s second-largest bank, BNZ, identified over a six-month period.
Shine staff have also encountered transaction abuse aimed at their clients on several occasions, Carrington says.
BNZ general manager of customer assist Martin King says the catalyst for the bank’s analysis was similar work done by CommBank in Australia last year.
The transaction abuse BNZ found fell into three main categories. The most common were references that included profanities or abusive language. “Sometimes you can determine it might be a joke, sometimes you can determine it as more than a joke,” King says.
Some of those transactions were clearly child support payments, but the abuse was not limited to partners or former partners. “There are cases where someone is clearly paying some money back, and they send it with some nasty words as well.”
King’s team also found examples of people using bank references as a secure messaging system. Analysts pieced together a full exchange between two…
Read More: ‘I can still get to you’: Bank payment references used to send thousands of