Tue 27th Feb, 2007
Social Impact of Scams
Mike Haley, head of Scambusters at the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), said:
“Scams affect not only individual victims, but also their families and communities, and can lead to debt, depression and health problems. Though anybody can be conned, it is always the most vulnerable who end up suffering the most.”
The OFT offers Scambuster’ booklet for concerned individuals.
There are many scams. The most popular include emails and phone calls where someone is dying and wants to donate money to charity, but their families will contest their wills. These people offer to donate the money through a victim, for a share, and in turn offer a reward.
Another common scam involves an email where someone has millions of dollars that they need to get out of the country and want a victim to help them and are willing to reward the person handsomely.
The most damaging is Phishing. This involves emails and web sites that ask consumers to enter their banking information.
Once fraudsters copied the HMRC logo onto emails that offered recipients a tax refund of £170. The victim clicked on a link to a bogus HMRC website and completed a form that asked for their bank details.
A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: “We are aware of these types of phishing frauds. We work with partners in the industry to actively investigate the bigger picture leading to them and many are on our Fraud Alert site on met.police.uk. We would be grateful if emails could be forwarded to us for possible inclusion on the website and to enable us to close down the server involved.
“Our advice is that if you receive something that appears to be too good to be true, then it generally it is.
“We advise anyone to forward suspicious correspondence to fraud.alert@met.police.uk and report to their local police station any money they have lost through such a scam.”