On September 21, Swedish police relaunched the national campaign "Dare to Be Rude." Actresses Suzanne Reuter and Christina Schollin, actor Lennart Jähkel, and journalist Claes Elfsberg will spend until October 11 explaining one simple thing to the country from billboards, television, and social media: if a "bank employee" calls — you can hang up, and it's not rude. The reason is in the numbers: in 2025, criminals extracted 5.7 billion kronor from Sweden, and they're targeting people over sixty first and foremost.
The news itself is almost a joke: the state officially permitted rudeness. Something else caught my attention. The campaign was commissioned by the police of a country where there has not been a single bank robbery since 2020, where cash has almost disappeared from circulation, and money moves between people with one phone tap. All friction was removed from the system long ago, and now the state is asking pensioners to manually reproduce the friction that no longer exists in the system.
The annual threat assessment for the banking industry from May 2025 opens with a sentence that's hard to read without surprise: "The last bank robbery in Sweden occurred in 2020." In forty-five years of tracking this statistic — they've been tracking since the late seventies — there has never been such a long window without incidents. In 2024, there was not a single attack on cash-in-transit vehicles, not one assault on Bankomat ATMs: no explosions, no attempts to crack open the cassettes.
The reason isn't that Swedes stopped stealing. There's simply no loot left in a place you can walk into. Banks removed cash from behind the counter, ATMs became fortified and half-empty, and money moved to accounts where you can't hold up a person with a crowbar.
During the same period, the number of registered fraud-related crimes reached 227,434 in 2024 alone. Separate statistics for "vishing" — telephone fraud — look like this: 5,285 cases in 2019 and 31,155 in 2024.
Here I should honestly note the first contradiction. Press releases from the same police in April 2026 report: criminal proceeds from fraud have been falling for the second year in a row — from 7.5 billion kronor in 2023 to 6.3 billion in 2024 and 5.7 billion in 2025, down 16 and 10 percent respectively. The media framing of "incredibly profitable year for fraudsters" rests on the absolute sum, while the police's own table shows 2023 as the peak. Both things can be true simultaneously: attempts are increasing while successful attempts are decreasing. But it's worth remembering that the campaign's argument is built from the gross figure, not from the trend.
In May 2026, Stockholm police analyzed about five thousand telephone frauds from January 2025 to March 2026 and got a portrait you don't want to look at for long. Average victim age is 79 years, and approximately 75 percent of them are women. Peak calls fall on weekdays from nine in the morning to nine at night, spikes in January-February and autumn; most suspects are men, average age 32, the youngest is 15.
A separate branch is called "physical vishing": the conversation ends not with a transfer but with a visit. The victim is told that a "bank employee" or "police officer" will come for their valuables to take them to a safe place — and they hand over gold and cards in their own hallway. National operations director Robert Eman describes the picture directly: in the current operation, police can confirm close cooperation between organized fraudsters and "purely violent" networks.
Violence didn't go anywhere — it changed its delivery method. Robbery requires the robber's presence and your physical accessibility; a phone call requires neither. Neighborhood protection from robbers was vertical: stronger safe, more patrols, better lighting. There is no protection from a call from another country for any neighborhood.
The key to the whole story is one court case. In August 2018, a fraudster called someone, introduced himself, extracted the BankID code and codes from the bank dosa — a device that generates one-time codes — then created a new BankID and on the same day withdrew two Swish transfers totaling 150,000 kronor. The next day another 247,000 went out. Total 397,000 kronor.
The Swedish Supreme Court in 2022 issued a ruling that the then consumer ombudsman called a revolution in responsibility distribution: the client acted grossly carelessly but not particularly reprehensibly, meaning their own liability is limited to a ceiling of 12,000 kronor. The bank returns the rest, and the burden of proving gross carelessness is on the bank.
The trap is in the legal fork. The 12,000 kronor ceiling applies to unauthorized transactions. But if the client was convinced to personally confirm the transfer in the app, the transaction is considered authorized — and the protection doesn't apply at all.
A BankID signature legally coincides with the person: it has no field for "who held my hand" and no mode for "I was forced." According to BankID's own statistics, in 2025 the service was used by 8.7 million people and was applied 7.9 billion times; among registered citizens aged 18–67, 99.9 percent have it. It's the only electronic signature that can be used under the rules to identify oneself with payment providers and authorize payments.
How much the 12,000 kronor ceiling helped in practice became visible fairly quickly. According to analysis by Swedish television and the consumer information bureau, already a year after the Supreme Court decision, the national consumer complaints board was denying four cases out of five. The refusal logic repeated: if the client was talked into signing the payment themselves, the complaint doesn't go through because the transaction is considered authorized. Neither the board nor the bank can challenge it — the client pressed the button themselves.
The Financial Inspectorate in its 2024 report documented the scale: in the second half of 2023 alone there were over 135,000 fraudulent transactions worth 1.1 billion kronor — three times more than in the second half of 2020. The inspectorate attributed two-thirds of registered cases to "social manipulation," and included the key phrase: "in this type of fraud, the consumer often has no right to compensation under current rules. Therefore, the losses are usually borne by them."
For comparison: in the UK, from October 7, 2024, reimbursement for fraud involving authorized push payments became mandatory, with a ceiling of £85,000 and payment within five business days; the exception for "gross negligence" is explicitly prohibited from being applied to vulnerable clients. Sweden still has no equivalent.
Now the police campaign reads differently. Its message is addressed precisely to that layer of users not covered by technical protection. "Many of us were raised to always be polite and accommodating, and in my generation there are many like that," says Suzanne Reuter. "But today you have to dare to ask questions. It's not rudeness, it's self-defense." Eman adds that fraudsters are qualified social engineers and know how to simultaneously build trust and create a sense of urgency.
The vulnerability of the elderly in Sweden isn't just about politeness. BankID has long become the key to all everyday life: bank, doctor's appointment, tax authority, social insurance, pension office. A person whose BankID breaks falls out not just of finance but of the country.
From March 1, 2026, BankID requires minimum Android 9 or iOS 16, and this kicked out of the system those using phones five to eight years old — iPhone 7, Samsung Galaxy S7, some popular Doro models. Mobile BankID is used by nearly 1.9 million people over 65. The alternative "BankID on card" is now issued by only two banks — Handelsbanken and SEB; Swedbank with Sparbankerna stopped issuing it in December 2024, Nordea doesn't issue new ones. And it works on a computer with a cable card reader and installed software.
One episode went through Swedish newsrooms in summer 2026: a 96-year-old woman abroad, in Åland, had her BankID blocked, and for restoration was offered to come to the Stockholm office, which she couldn't do for health reasons. A consumer lawyer describes the flow of inquiries from relatives like this: "the elderly have tremendous anxiety when they can't pay their obligations." Yet you can't transfer your BankID to your son: it's personal, and the Supreme Court in 2021 already obligated a man to answer for loans his cohabitant took using his electronic signature.
Official solutions on this are moving, but slowly and elsewhere. The state is planning its own electronic identification: the corresponding law comes into force December 1, 2026, the document will be issued by police together with the digital governance agency. Riksbank in its March 2026 report notes an even more prosaic asymmetry: helping another person pay is significantly more difficult than paying yourself; for power of attorney you often need to come in person to a branch with an original document. In December 2025, the government submitted a proposal for a national registry of representatives so banks can verify the authority of guardians and proxies online.
In parallel, Riksbank is trying to return a second path to the system — the very one that in a crisis doesn't depend on electricity and connectivity. In its 2026 payments report, it recommends introducing a ceiling of 10,000 kronor for cash purchases in retail, aligned with the pan-European limit of 10,000 euros coming into force in July 2027, and advises households to keep about 1,000 kronor per adult at home in case of failure. Central bank head Erik Thedéen comments on the limit unexpectedly warmly: it's needed, among other things, to remove the thesis "cash is only for criminals."
Simultaneously, from July 1, 2026, a law is in effect requiring grocery stores and pharmacies to accept cash. Exactly two exceptions are provided and both are vague: if security cannot be ensured at the point of sale or if it's impossible to keep it open due to the cost of handling cash.
The emergency circuit turned out to be leaky precisely when it was needed. In mid-2025, the company Bankomat, owned by banks, took cash-in-transit in-house, taking it from contractor Loomis — and got what it described to the press as "problems turned out to be bigger than we assumed." About a quarter of ATMs at some point stood empty or turned off, in some counties one or two remained working. The communications regulator noted that the goal for cash deposit accessibility was not met; Riksbank wrote that the incident "showed vulnerabilities and absence of working alternatives," and access to cash dropped sharply for several months.
The second contradiction, already between agencies, I honestly cannot resolve. The banking industry in the same threat assessment writes that cash is not a realistic emergency solution: infrastructure cannot be quickly scaled to volumes capable of replacing digital payments, and cites research in Denmark, Norway, and Ukrainian experience. Riksbank meanwhile recommends keeping bills at home and pushes legislative obligation to accept cash. Both sides present figures, both look convincing — the question is what horizon they're counting for: the central bank talks about the first days of failure, banks — about replacing the entire payment system.
There's also a very small oddity that explains a lot about accessibility statistics: the national coverage indicator counts Ica network checkouts as valid cash dispensing points, but not all banks subject to requirements have agreements with this network. Formally coverage is normal, in fact for a customer of most banks such a checkout is unavailable. The national indicator and personal experience are measured in different units.
In this construction, the loss remains at the slowest point — with whoever can't think quickly and doesn't have a lawyer. Banks spent effort primarily on their side of risk: improved mobile BankID issuance procedure (after it, unauthorized operations during issuance virtually stopped), amount limits, request to the regulator for the right to block Swish in proven abuse. The assessment of the effect "minus 40 percent fraud proceeds from phone calls" belongs to the industry association itself and has no independent audit.
Further down the money chain there's nothing either. For 2018–2021, police counted over 80,000 people who are merely "reasonably suspected" of fraud, and a significant portion of victims get nothing. Withdrawn funds go into crypto, into luxury goods, into informal transfer systems, and returning them through legal procedures is almost impossible. The demand to "be rude on the phone" turns out cheaper than any technical or legislative solution — because its cost is entirely shifted to the shoulders of a 79-year-old woman accustomed to trusting the word "bank."
As for the official solution: the police of a country where bank robberies ended in 2020 are now asking citizens to be rude. The handout materials include stickers suggested to be stuck on the phone and on the front door — paper reminders for a problem spawned by the absence of friction in everything else.