Digital Scams, Social Engineering, and Financial Consumer Protection: limits of automatic attribution and criteria for bilateral precaution

Abstract

This article examines the civil liability of financial institutions for digital scams carried out through social engineering,
from the perspective of financial consumer protection within the framework of financial citizenship. It argues that the automatic and undifferentiated attribution of liability to the bank tends to produce results that are both dogmatically imprecise and economically inefficient, insofar as it compresses causal analysis, obscures risk governability, and
weakens the logic of bilateral precaution. The article proposes a functional reading of banking civil liability oriented towards efficient prevention and the internalization of negative externalities, rebuilt around two analytical axes: the bank’s effective preventive control and the causal relevance of the user’s conduct. It is argued that effective protection of the digital financial consumer does not require unrestricted expansion of banking liability, but its reconstruction on bases more adherent to complex causality and the preventive rationality of the digital environment. The method is analytical-normative, grounded in the tools of Law and Economics.