Do you report a scam or keep it close to your chest?

I think this article unhelpfully reinforces the belief that there has to be some identifiable loss or victim, before a reportable “scam” takes place. As you say: “Tackling scams is a struggle for companies and authorities, who often don’t realise that there’s a problem until the scammers have moved on.”

When two or more persons are involved in planning a “scam” operation, the common law offence of conspiracy to defraud has already been committed, even before you receive that enticing email, phone call, or letter. No money needs to change hands, so whether it’s £73bn more or less, should be irrelevant to how many of these crimes are being reported.

If more people took the trouble to investigate something that looks dodgy and report it, there would be fewer victims. The problem that we as the public have, is where to report these mass attempts at fraud. I’m sure the police don’t want individuals reporting every phishing email, letter or international phone call. Maybe we need a National scam database where these incidents can be logged and monitored.

I run a rural area citizens’ information exchange service on specific, current suspicious activity. In following up on the cricumtsances of many crimes, and related suspicious activity it is alarming to see the high proportion of the public who place themselves unnecessarily at risk from various scamsters and crooks. Sometimes out of naivety and sometimes because people think that it has become the modern ‘norm’, people undertake ‘dealings’ with anonymous parties. People will deal with a person offering no name, address or land line telephone number – just a mobile phone number. Village shopekeepers and newsletters accept advertsiements with only a mobile phone number. Deposits are paid or access given to private premises with no identification as to who the ‘legal person’ on the other side is: no proprietor name(s) behind a trading name or no registered company details. Trading websites frequently fail to provide proprietor or company names (Companies Act 2006): the legitimate ones thereby give credence to the notion that it doesn’t matter – and so undermine their own credibility. Perhaps a short article by Which? could help members with the minimum information that a consumer can expect from a legitimate supplier and how to do a free check at Companies House. One way to identify many scamsters is to ask for the names and address of the proprietor(s) or of the company/charity name and registered number: legitimate businesse are unphased by the enquiry. Some scamsters will bluster at such requests: others will give false infromation which can be easily checked.

I have received several phone calls at various times warning that ‘internet threats’ have been detected on my computer. Some claim to be working for my ISP, but cannot tell me who the ISP is, and one even claimed to work for Microsoft. As ‘proof’ of the claim they ask me to run the Event Viewer which shows all the erros and warnings encountered by Windows including large numbers of apparently serious ones (but which of course are perfectly normal). They usually want me to give them control of my PC by installing something like teamviewer (a legitimate piece of software), and then pay for their technician to install their software. Who knows what sort of malware you could end up with?

I have been working on computers for many years and can treat these calls with the contempt they deserve, but I am worried that naive users may get caught out. As for reporting it, I am not sure where I should report it and unless I can record the phone call there is very little concrete to report.

I have been a victim of a scam and also unknown to me was my 80 year old mum. Both of us got a phone call from a company telling us that they would sort out out finance and would reduce our monthly payments to a much lower amount. I didn’t know that they had made contact with my mum and later me. They took out money from my mums bank account which left her in more dept than before making her direct debits unpaid. She then got bank charges. I saw what was going on and stopped my bank from them taking cash from my account. I feel we should be more protected this didn’t happen in the past so why have nothing been done. Government should be involved moor and banks. Only one way to stop this is us to inform banks free of change to get your money back from oversea. If its payed into a acccount a easy then should it be easy to get it back. All banks should get this sorted. How much money from al over the world must be enormous. It needs to be sorted out know before it gets worse.

@oldmarty
I do not know why most organisations opt to withhold their numbers….

This happens when outgoing calls are routed through a switchboard. However, that switchboard has a number – it’s the one people use to call in, so why outgoing calls don’t display that number is a mystery possibly only BT can answer.

Like everyone else, I get tons of spam emails that are automatically filtered into a SPAM folder. Now and then I look in there to check that a genuine email hasn’t been misdirected. Usually I just shrug it off, but today I found a scam email that actually had me worried. It’s obvious that it’s a scam, but the way it was addressed suggests that the people who sent it know that I am not a UK citizen and even where I grew up. It may just be coincidence, but this is information that I never divulge on-line. Has anyone else had any scam emails that appear to know rather more about you than they ought to?

There is a new scam where you receive a text from ‘Claim-Royalmail’ informing you that you have a parcel and that you must visit a website, when you do you will be asked for a copy of your passport, this is nothing whatsoever to do with the Royal Mail it is a site purchased from ‘Godaddy’ by a Private individual. Do not send any documents as there is no parcel.