By Bill Cunningham
Sometimes there’s good news to share around too about scams
To quote Which?
“Currently, many banks have signed up to a voluntary reimbursement code, but victims of bank transfer scams face a lottery depending who they bank with, with concerns about it being applied inconsistently. However, under the new bill, the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) can force banks to reimburse authorised push payments (APP).“ Exactly when this will become law and all banks have thus to comply is not sure yet but it’s great news for us. Meanwhile we remain vigilant about paying sellers via our online banking, where sellers have asked us to be paid this way.
A major scam hereabouts is courier or imper-sonator fraud. We get a call from the ‘police’ or the ‘bank’ from someone claiming that they need our help. A fraudster has been caught with our bank details and if we can help with collecting evidence. Also that we now had better transfer our money into a safe account just in case….
A courier will call to collect our cards for safe keeping meanwhile, and can we please disclose our PIN too, just in case…
Well, as usual, any call out of the blue from a stranger rings a warning bell. Especially when they say from the fraud team at ……. No bank nor the police will ever ask for our cards to be handed over to someone at the door. Nor ask us to open another account into which to transfer our money. Nor ask for our PIN. We’d never give such infor-mation to a stranger who approached us in the High Street. So …
Simply we drop the call from whoever it is, and after a gap a few minutes, or better still on another phone then call 101 to check identity of the police caller. Or call 159 to get through to our bank to see if it really was their call.
Cryptocurrency is another topical scam area. If we are called by a stranger to say it’s a cert that we’ll make money via them from invest-ing in cryptocurrency then it’s a scam. Some investments have been totally worthless and some famous ones have lost more than half of their value in a period of months.
A rogue-trader, director of Park Direct Gatwick Ltd, ran a bogus meet and greet car service from the airport. He was sentenced following investigation by West Sussex Trading Standards. Misled customers believed their cars were parked securely while they holidayed. In fact, they were left in an open field where officers found many unlocked. At least one was damaged and dash cam footage proved it had been driven around.