By Bill Cunningham
Scammers and Cost of Living
It’s no secret to scammers that we are in a cost of living challenge.
They will be working hard to exploit our vulnerability in the coming months, well aware of our concerns about how to cope.
Targeting us with “Help” from “OFGEM” to get the £400 (which we will in fact get automati-cally), “Help” with magic energy devices, “Help” to optimise our savings with great deals. All this requiring us to give them our banking details to receive the goodies of course.
200,000 people REPORTED falling victim to fraud in the last year; up by 27%. Many who have been scammed won’t bother to report it, of course.
Year on year the number of people reporting scam attempts has increased. So we must be vigi-lant and suspicious of any contact from any stranger about anything really. We must treat eve-ry call out of the blue as out of the red!
And by reporting scams we help each other to protect our diminishing savings.
Texting scams we forward to 7726, so our provider investigates the origin of the text, to block / ban the sender, if found to be malicious.
Phishing scams we forward to report@phishing.gov.uk
If scammed into handing over sensitive information, then we tell our bank ASAP.
The National Cyber Security Centre’s Suspicious Email Reporting Service received over 12 million reports from the public and has removed over 83,000 scams and 153,000 mali-cious websites. 13,000 scams have been removed as a result of suspicious text messages reported using the 7726 service.
So, reporting works!