[emiliobumachar]

Agreed. Thought experiment: suppose instead that Fraudster convinced Alice that he represented BigBank, and so Alice was duped and gave her money to Fraudster thinking she was depositing into BigBank.

The only thing she could expect from BigBank was politeness while explaining to her that she was duped. If it's a very friendly bank, she may tie up a manager for a couple hours, but that's it. If she keeps coming back, she'll soon be escorted out by security, or the cops.

Now, what if she started falsely telling others that BigBank took her money, and that significantly affected BigBank's reputation? Are we talking jail time, or just civil penalties?

[sowbug]

An even more analogous experiment would have Alice take out a mortgage with BigBank, then receive a fake notice of debt reassignment to BiggerBank, which is actually Mallory. Alice makes mortgage payments to Mallory for many months. Now BigBank is wondering why Alice fell behind on her mortgage.

Who's the victim?

[dragonwriter]

> Now, what if she started falsely telling others that BigBank took her money, and that significantly affected BigBank's reputation? Are we talking jail time, or just civil penalties?

Probably not jail time, and perhaps not civil penalties. Even civil defamation in US law generally requires knowing falsehood or reckless disregard for the truth, not just mere falsehood, and criminal defamation, where it exists, tends to have high . Unless the bank had provided concrete evidence so solid that it was unreasonable for her not to believe their denial of responsibility, there likely be no legal wrongdoing.

[dlubarov]

> Are we talking jail time, or just civil penalties?

Jail time could be a possibility depending on jurisdiction. In the US, a handful of states have criminal defamation statutes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation#Criminal_defamation...

[devotedtoneu]

This is actually quite eye-opening. Thank you for that.