Do you know an older person affected by fraud?

Isn’t this all about trust in the new digital age ?
In times gone by it was spivs and “con merchants ” who you met face to face now its digitally done to the great delight of millions of crooks worldwide.
People in this country were brought up to have trust in others , my old tenement door key in my street could be bought in the newsagents at the bottom of the road, now its virtual and remote with any Tom.Dick Harry being able to con the honest ,innocent members of the public .
The government knew when it said — go digital that there would be “casualties ” they just didn’t realise the extent of those “casualties ” and now are using damage limitation methods and third parties to distance themselves from the reality , they should have looked at America who had already gone through all that making its citizens more educated to watch out for fraudsters .
By denying direct government action via regulation of the industry they do a great disservice to this country.

From the rise in number of discussions about fraud on these pages and reports in the magazine, our society seems to have a major problem. To keep it in perspective, it would be good to know how many of us have never experienced fraud. I am not aware of being a victim.

I very rarely discuss money with friends and family and the only significant financial loss I have been told of was when a significant amount of money was removed from a friend’s account years ago. He had done nothing wrong and the money was refunded promptly by the bank. I banked with this bank and this incident gave me the confidence to make use of online banking.

My own defence against fraud has been a refusal to act on phone calls or emails from companies about anything financial, even if they appear to be from companies I use. Usually I ignore them but if they might be genuine I look up their phone number and call the company.

I am fed-up with the number of supposedly reputable companies that put clickable links in emails. These links are often used by rogues. If we learned that genuine businesses did not send email containing links we could assume that others could be scams.

Popular phone scams ask for victims to press buttons on their keypad, but that is asking for trouble. If a company or other organisation needs to speak to us then it would be better to ask a customer to look up a phone number or email address from our record or the website and get in contact. That’s not as convenient, but better than being robbed.

It’s amazing that some people will divulge passwords, so I suggest that organisations refer to them as ‘secret passwords’ to reinforce that they must not be divulged.