Obtaining goods or money by deception? Why is it ridiculous? Because it's too hard to prove? If the banks have admitted mis-selling surely that's acceptance of guilt?
And who do you charge with it? It's the individual staff members down at branch/call centre level that did it. Not the executives. It was the unintended consequences of incentivising staff on PPI. Consequences they are not paying dearly for because the PPI repayment liabilities are HUGE - many times more than the PPI profit IMHO.
'The Bank' isn't one person it's thousands of people.
My point remains - financial services do this sort of thing all the time and will carry on doing it because they just accept getting caught as a risk of doing business in this way. The reward is too great and the risk too small.
Lets go back to my Norton idea. Would you consider it fair if you were arrested for obtaining funds by deception if it turned out one of your staff had been earning his £20 a go commission by telling people that if they didnt buy it, the hardware would fail within 6 months?
It would be your decision to incentivise the staff that gave rise to the deception, but not your decision or even intention to decive. Your intention was simply to sell more copies of Norton.
It's completley wrong to say this is a financial services only thing. All areas of business do this. They shouldn't, but it happens. From car salesmen insisting you cant buy without Supaguard to people flogging overpriced double glazing to pensioners - in ANY area of sales where you incentivise staff, you will get bad apples who will lie in order to shift more product and earn more commission.
I bet there isn't a SINGLE incentive scheme in ANY area of sales in ANY sector where people have never, ever lied to get a sale to earn commission.
This is a problem with commission based sales. It isn't a financial services thing, its an everything-thing. If you are paying somebody a low basic topped up by commission he's going to sell sell sell. Which is what you want - but many will realise they can sell sell sell x 2 if they pretty much force products on people.
Thats what happens when you pay £15k a year with the potential to use commission to significantly bump that!