As Government support has been rolled out to help people with the soaring cost of living, criminals have been offering refunds and using other ploys to steal people’s money. The fraudsters pretend to be from banks or other organisations to get people to hand over personal or financial details.
Will Ayles is director and co-founder of Refundee, which helps scam victims get their money back.
He told Express.co.uk that the “hooks” fraudsters use to entice their victims have changed with cost of living scams.
One scam they are commonly seeing reported is the “safe account” scam, when a person is duped into thinking their money is at risk.
Mr Ayles explained how the scam works: “A victim might receive a phishing SMS that convinces them that they should enter some card details.
READ MORE: Half a million pensioners to miss out on state pension rise due to where they live
“They do that and then shortly afterwards receive a call from their ‘bank’ (the fraudsters) who explain that the SMS was fraudulent, they have just shared card details, and now their entire bank account is at risk of theft.
“The victim then panics, and through this clouded judgement, the fraudsters then convince the victim to send their money (all of it normally) to a new bank account under a false name.
“They promise that the money will be returned to them after their account has been secured, but of course they never see it again.”
Phishing SMS text messages often include links to fake websites,…
