Age UK

MORPETH ROTARY SCAM AWARENESS

Chris Balfour, Scam Awareness Officer for Age UK Northumberland, said fraud and scam crime is having its biggest growth ever in the UK. He offers information sessions, home visits, and a drop in service at his office to help beat the criminals as older people are often targetted. Victims can be left with physical and mental damage. Younger people are targetted but it is usually with frauds on currency exchange and bitcoin dealing. 

Approaches can be postal, on-line, telephone and face to face. There are offers to do work on your garden or property, selling things round the doors at inflated prices, being asked to fill in a survey with your personal details, and 'charities' employing agencies to go round collecting. Do not transact anything in cash to a cold call on the doorstep. More recently, with tapping cards on cash machines to pay at shops, thieves will deliberately bump into you in the hope of getting a good enough signal to take money from your card into a terminal they carry in their pocket. You can get a small device that will jam the signal. There are scams on mobile phones now as well as landlines. There is a setting on some mobiles that will block unknown callers. There are many false web sites that look like the real thing. Chris offered a great deal of information and advice on all of the systems used by scammers and how to avoid them.