20
Sep
2016
By Calvin at 09:09 GMT, 7 years ago
The BBC news on Radio 4 caught my ear this morning with a report that there had been yet another huge increase in credit card and banking fraud. I think the reporter mentioned a roughly 50% rise in the first half of the year when compared to the same period last year. The report included an interview with a lady who had been tricked into giving out her PIN and password to a caller on the phone, because she had been convinced he was from the police.
I don’t know if the banks/police have a typical profile for the type of person who gets duped or if there is some test available that would identify them, but it seems to me that some folk are a lot more vulnerable to being tricked by these nasty criminals.
State Pensions being paid directly into people’s bank accounts; post office closures; bank branch closures and a move towards a cashless society have driven the vulnerable inextricably towards online payment and banking and its related technology that they don’t understand and can barely cope with and you don’t need to be reading reports about the problem to know that things are getting really bad!
Here’s my experience of the problem in just one week!
I was in my local supermarket the other day watching this very elderly lady try three times to punch in her PIN before she succeeded on the third occasion. Her PIN was 2636 by the way; probably her date of birth. It was easy to read the number, because she took so blinking long to punch it in. Now what’s to stop some thieving SOB from hanging around the tills in a very busy supermarket seeing the same thing as me and then snatching the lady’s handbag and stealing a few hundred quid from her using the cash-point machine outside? Nothing! I’ve even witnessed one elderly lady reading out her PIN for the cashier to punch in because she couldn’t see the numbers very well.
A neighbour of mine (who knew I was a retired cop) knocked on the door the day after she got a call from a phone scammer who was pretending to be her bank. “Did you give out your PIN and password?”I asked, “No” was the reply. “Did you report the matter?” “No”. The very same day one of my wife’s clients talked about a letter she received from a solicitor telling her that she had inherited a large sum of money from a long-lost relative. She said it was very convincing, but was pretty sure that the solicitor had mistaken her for someone else! My wife and I had to convince her that the writer was not a solicitor and that this was a complete scam and that she didn’t have a long-lost relative with money!
Since 15th September Google (Thank goodness for Google) has automatically placed 18 spam messages into my spam box; four of which were phishing scams pretending to be from one of my banks and one from a bank that I do not have an account with all telling me that there was a problem with the account and I should click a link to fix it.
So it seems to me that while we’re waiting for the bankers and their clever dicks to come up with a more secure payment system and more secure bank accounts we’ve got to keep on with the same old messages about never giving out PINS and Passwords.
I shall now go and lie down for a moment
Identity theft and fraud: http://thecrimepreventionwebsite.com/personal-security/662/identity-theft-and-fraud/
Buying stuff online: http://thecrimepreventionwebsite.com/identity-theft-and-fraud/785/buying-stuff-online-security-checklist/
Taking care at cash-points: http://thecrimepreventionwebsite.com/robbery-and-theft-risk/660/taking-care-at-cashpoints/
Fraud The Facts 2016: https://fraudfacts16.financialfraudaction.org.uk/
