The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2022–2023
HSBC Argentina's Dear Customer plays a bank robbery with an online scam's script
Dear Customer restages the clichéd bank robbery with the polite language of an online scam, so scam victims' compliance reads as the danger it is.
HSBC Argentina
What it had to solve
Online scams talk nothing like the danger behind them: the script is polite, familiar and official, and victims follow it. HSBC Argentina wanted the gap between a scam's calm tone and the hold-up it really is to be felt.
How it works
HSBC Argentina wanted people to recognise online scams for what they are. The problem is that a scam does not sound dangerous: its language is polite, official and familiar, which is exactly why victims follow the instructions — so the bank's advert had to make that tone itself feel like a threat.
Dear Customer does it with a collision of two scenes. Visually it is the clichéd bank robbery — masks, weapons, tension — but the dialogue is the language of an online scam. Rather than hearing what thieves would say in a typical robbery, viewers hear the script a fraudster would use, and see how victims act when they face this kind of threat.
The device makes the familiar strange: a calm, well-worded instruction spoken over a hold-up suddenly reads as coercion, and the victim's compliance looks like the danger it is. The film entered the D&AD awards archive as a reference for turning the invisible mechanics of fraud into something watchable.
Why it lands
- The robbery gives the scam a body: everyone believes a masked bank raid is dangerous, so the visual carries the menace the words hide.
- Hearing the fraudster's actual script — polite and official — teaches recognition better than any warning about it.
- Showing the victim following the script makes the point behavioural: compliance, not gullibility, is what the scam exploits.
- The mismatch between calm dialogue and armed violence is what makes the film memorable enough to be retold.
What it did
Putting the scam's words into a robbery scene turns the fraudster's polite script into menace and the victim's compliance into the point of danger. The film entered the D&AD awards archive as an advertising film case.
What you can take
To make a familiar fraud feel like a real threat, stage it in the one scene whose danger everyone already believes: the mismatch between polite words and armed violence does the persuading.
Since then
Dear Customer sits in the D&AD awards archive as an advertising film case, where its device — robbery visuals carrying an online scam's dialogue — remains a reference for showing how fraud actually speaks to its victims.
Sources
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