Sue Flood told ITV how she never thought she would fall victim to a scam but ended up losing £250,000 in a sophisticated pension scam. She wants to warn others so they don’t fall for the same tricks.
Exrpress journalist Jackie Annett has witnessed the “scamdemic” first hand.
She said: “My Facebook profile ought to put scammers off – if you look closely it clearly says I’m a journalist at Express.co.uk and I run a personal finance blog called Broke in Bristol (& beyond).”
” But scammers will go to the ends of the earth to try and scam people out of their hard earned cash, no matter who they are.
Although the fraudster wasn’t asking me for money to release my winnings, they wanted me to share my address details which can be used to take out loans and credit cards, throwing people into thousands of pounds worth of debt.
Fraud now accounts for more than a third (39 percent) of all crime according to figures from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) for 2021.
I’m not surprised in the least, as this isn’t the only occasion this year I have been approached by scammers.
Last year I put my campervan and an iPhone 11 up for sale on eBay and Facebook Marketplace which is when I witnessed first hand the scale of the scamdemic in the UK.
Within the space of a few days, more than ten people tried to scam me for the phone – and four people attempted to scam me over the campervan.
Initially, I’ll admit I was a little amused as I thought to myself “you’re trying to scam the wrong person here”.
Amusement soon turned to annoyance and eventually fear of what some of these people might stoop to, in order to get their hands on goods that are worth hundreds or thousands of pounds.
At one point scammers were offering to send a courier to my doorstep to pick up the keys to my campervan.
That’s when the reality that I could be in danger hit home.
People can report scams to Action Fraud on 0300 123 2040.
