In January 2017, a woman claiming to be Charlotte Higman telephoned the Royal Bank of Scotland and asked for a security reset on Charlotte Higman’s account. She probably referred to it as “my account” if she was canny. She was canny: when the bank rang back on Charlotte Higman’s home phone number (in an attempt to make sure they were genuinely talking to Charlotte Higman), it had already been fraudulently diverted to a mobile phone in the possession of the Charlotte Higman impersonator.

We don’t know who this woman was but, for clarity, I’m going to refer to her as Nadine Dorries MP. There is no suggestion, incidentally, that this scam was perpetrated by the MP Nadine Dorries. That’s why I’ve given the fraudster a slightly different name: her surname is actually MP and Dorries is a middle name. Still, that would cause some confusion if she ever became an MP! She’d be Nadine Dorries MP MP! And there’s already a Nadine Dorries MP! That would certainly be an amusing outcome.

But Nadine Dorries MP isn’t the sort of person likely to become a respected parliamentarian. And this scammer sounds like a bit of a shit as well. Having reset the account, Nadine Dorries MP (not the MP) then transferred £4,318 (nice and specific) into another account. Later on in her 23-minute phone call with the bank (I don’t know what they were talking about in the meantime), Ms MP requested a second transfer, as a result of which she was asked some security questions about Charlotte Higman, at least one of which she got wrong. So this second transfer was refused. But the initial one wasn’t recalled – or reversed or stopped or bounced or whatever they’d do. They just let it go through.

The world being awful, it probably won’t surprise you to hear that RBS’s initial response when Charlotte Higman complained that her account appeared somewhat depleted was not to acknowledge culpability, restore the money and take urgent steps to track down Nadine Dorries MP. No, its view was that all this was Charlotte Higman’s problem. And, when Charlotte Higman made a complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service, that was also the Financial Ombudsman Service’s view.

One of the cleverest things the banking sector has done since the advent of the internet is to establish the notion of “identity theft”. Robert Webb and I once wrote a sketch about it, in which a hapless account holder tries in vain to argue that it was the bank, rather than him, that had had something stolen: “I still seem to have my identity – whereas you seem to have lost several thousands of pounds.”

People have always tried to rob banks… stopping that happening was down to the bank. That was their pitch

A lot of what is called identity theft is, in truth, bank robbery. Someone has approached a bank and absconded with money that doesn’t belong to them. Instead of a gun, they used a disguise. People have always tried to rob banks and, traditionally, stopping that happening was down to the bank. That was their pitch: give us your money and we’ll keep it safe. We might lend it out while you don’t need it, and you might get a bit of the proceeds of that, but then we’ll give it back to you. You can trust us not to give your money away to someone random. It’s our job to not do that.

With the concept of “identity theft”, however, banks try to absolve themselves of that fundamental responsibility. So now if someone steals from them in disguise, they claim that’s an issue between the thief and the person the thief is disguised as. If a gang of armed bank robbers were wearing Tony Blair masks, would the bank now debit all the stolen cash from the former prime minister’s account? That’s a nice idea for a sympathetic heist movie.

Earlier this month, RBS finally restored Charlotte Higman’s account balance, but only after a BBC Watchdog Live investigation. “On review of Mrs Higman’s case,” said an RBS spokesperson, “and in light of new information provided to us, we have refunded Mrs Higman in full for her loss.” But it wasn’t her loss, it was the bank’s. Someone stole some money from the bank and the bank decided not to make a fuss, but to charge the loss to a customer.

It’s bizarre behaviour, because there was definitely a theft. That was clear from the start. Charlotte Higman maintained it was the mysterious caller (Nadine Dorries MP) who’d taken the money, but RBS implied for a long time that Mrs Higman herself must have done it. It claimed that, since it had called Charlotte’s home number and got through, she must have known about the transactions. If that were true, it would mean she had transferred money out of her account and then denied it. That too would have been theft.

So why did the bank take no action against a customer it thought was attempting to defraud it? Either it didn’t really think that, or it is extraordinarily relaxed about losing four-figure sums – rather a high-handed way to behave for an institution that owes its continued existence to the generosity of the taxpayer.

I do realise that, if we’re going to have online banking, customers have to take some responsibility for keeping their money secure. If you start putting your passwords on Facebook so friends can help you remember them, banks are put in an impossible position. Then again, if you find the online world impersonal and bewildering, there is no longer a realistic option of banking in the old-fashioned way – of having a personal contact with a bank employee, in a branch you can walk to, to whom you can hand your money and who will hand it back only to you.

We’re all forced to engage with internet and telephone banking, with all their possibilities for fraud, primarily because it’s a cost-efficient way for banks to do business. All those high street premises, all the cash and cash machines and UK-based staff created huge overheads. But it doesn’t seem right that the banks benefit from all the cost savings made by going online, while customers take the hit for the consequent ease with which money can be stolen.