BY BILL CUNNINGHAM
Scamming is affecting almost all of us daily, and needs tackling full on to make our lives more tolerable and safe. Trading Standards and its initiative Friends Against Scams is one way this is happening. The aims is to prevent and protect us from becoming victims of a multitude of scams.
See friendsagainstscams.org.uk
Scam Champion volunteers like myself give our time to combat the tsunami of frauds in several ways. We do this by giving presentations to community groups about how to avoid becoming a victim of fraud is one of our activities. Writing articles such as this in community publications is another. Also disseminating Trading Standards leaflets about scams and cold calling frauds to community centres, retail outlets and libraries.
Fraud is now the largest crime type in the UK and is evolving to become quite sophisticated by criminals; often hitching their approach to current news items. They have benefited a lot from our lockdowns in the past year; exploiting our fears about Covid, vaccinations, and our sometimes misunderstanding of what we are/are not allowed to do and how to be able to travel abroad. We could get a calls out of the blue about offers of help with passports and assorted Covid testing. But by now we can be pretty sure that these type of calls will be out of the red. Someone phishing to then capture the details missing from the profile he has already of us. We leave a lot of information on social media sites about us and our lives. All he/she needs a few details to complete the picture, to then pretend to be us; maybe take out a loan in our name.
We can be lured into typing personal details onto a fraudulent website to an address that is pretty close to the genuine one without realising.
It’s summer at last and many of us still harbour hopes that we can fly off to the sun. Alas we have to expect the seasonal scams to accompany our new found freedoms including dining out. Videos can help and this example above has timely advice for us all regarding summer activities including eating out. Merged into advice about phishing generally. Some £575 million was lost last year to card scams, but “only” £12m of which was contactless scamming.
We have to be vigilant and VERY protective in disclosing any banking details to not get caught up in disclosing them freely. Seasonal or not. If you have a computer then have a look at this explicit warning.
Later in the year our contactless pay limit can be upped from £45 to £100 by all card issuers if they choose. So we had best be even more protective really, for a fraudster could pretty quickly have a spending spree with a stolen or cloned card.