By Bill Cunningham
Watch out for pound loss!
It’s the time of year to lose a few pounds! We would not, of course, wish to lose any pounds from our purse or wallet and there are a lot of ways to possibly fulfill that aim. One being to keep well away from scammers, because if they can’t engage with us then we can’t be scammed. But maybe we’d be too smart to end up as a victim of scamming anyway. That happens to other people, doesn’t it? We’d not find ourselves on a website called currys-uk.online rather than the real one of currys.co.uk. We’d not be taken in by an email that looks like it’s from Waterstones but is not from the real one of waterstones.com. We’d not be buying on any fraudulent websites to then lose all the money we send to them. Would we? Surely, we would always go direct to the real seller’s website and not via a social media prompt or attachment. One major bank reported that online purchases accounted for half of their customers’ scams, and of this 75% was via Facebook Marketplace. Another bank stated that social media is now the source of nearly 90% of all purchase scams it handles. Scamming can be quite so-phisticated and it’s really not shameful to have become a victim. If we know of people less well clued up than us, then we could resolve to help them not lose money to fraud and not become a victim of a type of crime that accounts for about half of all crime now in the UK. We could even visit www.friendsagainstscams.org.uk and learn how to become a Scam Champion.