Fri 23rd Feb, 2007
Fraudsters Target UK Consumers
The ruthlessness of fraudsters who operate massive scale scams was exposed this week in a report by consumer watchdogs.
Every year criminals rake in £3.5bn from UK consumers. Behind the statistics live the tragic stories of vulnerable people ruined by scammers who, repeatedly prey on the same victims until they are ruined. Many people who respond to a scam end up on ‘sucker’s lists’ that are shared by fraudsters.
The Office of Fair Trading published a report that reveals stories of people who lost their entire life savings.
Thisismoney.co.uk reports - In one case a woman wrote: ‘My 82-year-old mother was receiving up to 70 letters a day. I realised last year that she had gone through her entire life savings and was running up considerable debts in the belief that she had won a lot of money.
‘She had given out her personal details including her credit card number to a large number of companies and her credit card was hit repeatedly for small amounts of money which mounted up to £7,000 of debt in a very short space of time’
An MP who contacted the OFT on behalf of a constituent wrote: ‘The sheer volume of communications sent to one address beggars belief. The elderly gentleman was an ex-school head-teacher and clearly of the tradition that such letters should be answered. He spent over £4,000 in one month sending cheques which were demanded by scam letters.’
Recent research commissioned by the OFT involving 11,200 interviews found that every year about 1,388,000 UK consumers fall victim to prize draw and sweepstake scams, 400,000 to bogus holiday clubs, 330,000 to work at home scams, 200,000 to miracle health scams, 170,000 to clairvoyant and psychic scams, 110,000 to loan scams.