Phone Cheats

These types of scams are on the increase. They appear very plausible and you can be easily misled and could lose your life savings.

'Vishing' and courier scam complaints increase
(BBC News)

Best thing I ever did was to invest in a call blocker from ebay ...

CPR Call Blocker

Not had a nuisance call get through for weeks now and even if they do manage it they get blocked straight after .

Re: Phone Cheats

I am amazed that people are so gullible I would be very sceptical about any instructions given to me in a phone call and would want to go to a branch of my bank and speak to someone in person before moving a sum like £155,000

There is a prominent warning on my banking website about bogus calls and emails.

Re: Phone Cheats

Yes I know of these scams but it is still worthwhile reminding everyone of what's going on.

I've been getting calls recently from an International number (withheld). I let the answerphone kick in and the call is terminated by them before the end of the welcoming message!

I'm wise to it all, but many still aren't.

Re: Phone Cheats

Poor woman has been duped out of £68,000 and the banks are not paying her back by the looks of it. I mean that could easily kill someone off if not quickly then subject them to a lingering one (death).

Re: Phone Cheats

I used to have meetings, in branch, with their financial adviser. Now I ignore the repeated messages begging me to go in. I, repeat I, decide now what to do with my hard earned!

Not that I have anything NEAR £155k. Phew, what a nest egg, eh??

Re: Phone Cheats

I think what could be happening is that people are losing their partners and are suddenly required to think for themselves with matters that they know nothing about. Women losing their husbands when the husband was the person who dealt with all money matters - or vice versa. This makes them especially vulnerable and during the 'learning phase' they must be very easy prey for these swines.

Re: Phone Cheats

I have a Gteed Equity Bond maturing early 2014. One of 3 my bank persuaded me to take out (never again) and it's going straight back into an account where I know what it's doing and reinvest accordingly.

No-one gets their paws on my money, certainly not by scammers. The thieving no good deleted expletives!

Re: Phone Cheats

Very true!

Re: Phone Cheats

I fear any fraudster would be sadly disappointed with my life savings.

Even so you would need to torture me to get my pin number ..

Re: Phone Cheats

Unfortunately Meg many people of our age group and over are either gullible or just so trusting of what they believe is an authority that they fall into the trap too readily.

My MIL is almost 90 and she was a book-keeper for much of the time in her working life but we found that she'd been mislead into believing that donations she gave to well-known charities were one-off payments.
They were not.

She had £110+ going out of her bank account every month and 3 of those regular payments were suspect - out of a total of 7, plus 3 annual payments - she'd paid out £1412 in a year from her meagre income.

The worst part was when we asked her why she was paying out monthly, for example, £34 to one major, genuine Charity - she didn't even realise that she was.
We found paperwork sent to her, unsolicited, from respectable Charities but the wording and tiny check-boxes were so confusing it wasn't hard to realise how easily she'd been duped, often on unsolicited 'phone calls that she'd forgotten about.

We also found other, more dubious ones based overseas that she paid out to and she had no idea who they were or how she had signed-up to them; a charity for orphans in the Philippines run by, apparently, Nuns was one that caught our eye.
She gave them £20 per month and all the correspondence that she had, which she kept, was hand-written!

There were 3 payment she made monthly and 1 annually to foreign charities that neither she or we had ever heard of at all.

The saddest thing for my wife is the fact that her mother had been a book-keeper; someone you might expect to be a little more clued-up on finance, but she's the opposite and does not seem to understand that her income, after all essentials are deducted, actually leaves her with only £42 per week to live on - all she sees is the bottom line on her bank statement.

She doesn't seem to realise that she has been spending more than she had coming in and that balance is going down alarmingly but she's now telling my wife on the 'phone that she's destroying her bank statements, so we're even more worried.

Why is she doing that?

It's people like her Meg, in their thousands that are 'fleeced' all the time. stevmk2