Answer: I’m very sorry that your father had to go through this. Unfortunately, he’s not alone in having been targeted in this way. Which? found that one in five social media scams reported to its scam sharer tool between March 2021 and January 2022 involved WhatsApp.
But impersonating a child asking for money from their parents is just one of the seemingly endless list of techniques fraudsters are using to trick us into parting with our cash.
UK Finance, the trade association for the banking and financial services sector, estimates that £1.3 billion was lost through fraud in 2021. The majority (£583.2m – a year-on-year increase of 39 per cent) came from ‘authorised push payment’ (APP) fraud, where victims are tricked into sending money to criminals. Nearly 40 per cent of all scams involved impersonation.
Given the scale of APP fraud, most major banks have signed up to the Contingent Reimbursement Model Code (CRM), a voluntary code of practice which instructs them to reimburse victims who are not at fault. The sophistication of scams can make many scams astonishingly difficult to spot. Yet less than half of all money lost to authorised fraud is returned to victims, and Which? research has found that banks often drag…
