By Bill Cunningham
In life we have to trust something and someone. But who and how and when and what is the challenge, with so much scamming around our ears.
We all welcome genuine help with our scarce resources to pay for the cost of just staying safe and well and fed and warm, in the months ahead. So spotting the genuine approaches from the downright dangerous is what we’d best focus on for a time.
It’s natural to want to help our friends and our kids and family. So when they get in touch to seek our help then we usually respond pronto. But in the last month in particular there’s been a huge increase in scams from fraudsters using WhatsApp, pretending to be a member of our family or a very good friend. An urgent message from them, from an unusual number, stating that they’ve hit circumstances where they must get money there and then, and have had to use the mobile phone of a friend to make contact.
But we know by now, don’t we, that any contact out of the blue that says we must immediately transfer money, because ……… is a bright red alert warning. A warning that we must contact the source whose number we know to be real and ask them what the panic is all about.
If we’ve had a call from a “bank” to say that urgently we must transfer our “at risk” savings to a new account, then that’s 100% a scam. We check any claimed call from a bank by finishing the call. We wait a few minutes and, preferably on another phone, call 159 (Stop Scams UK) set up to fight impersonation fraud. Almost all banks belong in the scheme. Simply we ask to be put on to our own bank, then to ask what the urgent call was about to learn it’s been a scam call, which it almost certainly will have been. And we don’t trust any links or attachments to an email till we first check that they are genuine. If from a stranger, then we never click or open.