National Insurance Scam

It’s been a while since the last ‘scam’ post, but the fraudsters are still active!

One current scam is a National Insurance one, which Action Fraud says has been reported to them over 1,000 times, making it the most reported phone scam of this year so far (We had one of these phone calls this morning.) The same scam is now being sent out by email. Both phone and email use the same tactics.

They tell you that your National Insurance number has been used to fraudulently claim benefit, and ask for some personal details. They may tell you this is so you can be issued with a new NI number, or for ‘verification’, and sometimes that you’ll be liable to repay the amount claimed if you don’t give them the details they need.

Hang up the phone or ignore any links in the email and delete it.

WhatsApp Privacy

An issue that only affects WhatsApp users is a recent change to their default security settings. It was explained in their updated conditions of use, and I expect most of us just clicked accept without reading the whole document. The new default setting for WhatsApp is that everyone can find you and see your details – this includes businesses as well as individuals. If you wish to restrict who can see you:

1. Click Settings in WhatsApp
2. Click Account
3. Click Privacy This takes you to a list:  Last Seen, Profile Photo etc.
4. Against each item on the list you’ll see one out of these three settings: Everybody/My Contacts/Nobody
5. Click the little arrow to the right of the setting and choose which of the three levels of privacy you prefer.

Remember that WhatsApp only recognises mobile numbers in international format e.g +44 7974 1****6, so you may need to change some of the numbers in your contacts to include the appropriate international code.

An attempted phone scam has just been reported in the village. The caller claimed to be from Bristol CID and to have arrested someone with a large quantity of money on them.

These phone fraudsters are very persuasive, passing the call to their “inspector”, mentioning banks and credit cards and saying you have to act quickly. They then ask your help to catch the suspect’s accomplices – this involves you going to your bank and taking out a large amount of cash, which the “police” will then come and check for forged notes. They may also tell you not to talk to anyone about this or it could undermine their case.

The scammers may ask you to hang up, then call back to verify that they really are the police. When you hang up, they stay on the line then “answer” your new call. Therefore it’s important that you make any call to the police or to your bank to verify their story from a different phone line and use a number for the police or bank which you know is a genuine one.

Fortunately, our neighbour was very suspicious of this call, so hung up and reported it.

Remember:

• it’s possible to ‘spoof’ phone numbers so it appears that scammers are calling from a genuine police number
• don’t give details like your credit card number and PIN over the phone to anyone unless you are absolutely certain you know who they are

Fuller details can be found here: https://www.herts.police.uk/Information-and-services/Advice/Crime-prevention/Protect-your-money/Scam-police-and-bank-callers