By Tracy Moore, Neighbourhood Watch and Bill Cunningham, Scamwatch
Neighbourhood Watch
I would like to introduce myself as the new Shepperton Watch co-ordinator having recently taken over from Mr Mick Hussey. It was a while ago now however; my day job has unfortunately kept me extremely busy! I have been told I have big shoes to fill so please join me in thanking Mick for all his very generous years of fulfilling this supportive community role so well.
A bit about my motivation; I started a watch for my own close in 2019 after a number of incidents occurred in the close with my neighbours and then I had an attempt-ed break in at my own house. I volunteered to become the Shepperton coordinator as I wanted to help the community become more aware of what is happening around them and help signpost tools and resources that can help and assist you in hopefully becoming less of a target for crimi-nals. I plan to start a Neighborhood Watch social media Facebook page and this will be set up shortly. Anyone will be able to access this across Shepperton and I hope to understand more in the next few days about the requirements for running such a page (there are quite a few require-ments!).
If you are interested in becoming a Neighbourhood Watch coordinator for your road, street or group of houses, please do get in touch, it’s probably not like what you expect!
Tracy (Shepperton NHW Coordinator). Please email wadhamnhw@gmail.com
Ever thought about buying online?
You are not alone! Increasingly too are more fraudsters earning off the online traffic. So there’s a lot we should consider before parting with our card details.
The padlock in the address bar means our website purchase has password and card details scrambled. But we can still be securely communicating with a crook!
Has the website an office contact number, full address and email. If not then do we really want the product that much to risk our personal and payment details?
Retailer reviews by such as Trustpilot can have the stars given manipulated. It would be com-forting if all sellers with 100% 5 star ratings meant pretty much a guarantee of quality, but fake reviews happen.
If only 5 stars showing and wonderful praise we know real life is not like that. Even if the products actually are outstanding, some will rubbish them.
Where many of the reviews are nearly/ exactly the same, gushing, then maybe from the same hand?
Prices dramatically lower than the same product got elsewhere? We know, don’t we, that if it’s too good to be true then ….
For something that costs more than £100 we should pay by a credit card. Read info on section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act to see why.
If spending less or paying by debit card then see Chargeback Scheme on moneysavingex-pert.com. It’s still best to avoid paying by bank transfer unless it’s the only payment method available, and we should be really convinced that we are dealing with a trustworthy retailer.
All this checking takes time and we can take shortcuts. Depends really on how much we are prepared to risk.