scammed out of £525.000

Shinamae

MissAdventure

I had a call from a "solicitor" just after my girl died, telling me they had been hired to recoup money owed by her to the water company.
Somebody them told me that these people can look up death notices and scam relatives into paying off "debts".

That is absolutely abhorrent. So sorry you had to go through that????

This is absolutely disgusting,when you are grieving you do not think straight.
My very elderly aunt went through a similar thing after she lost her DH. She kept getting "Messagges ''from the bank about their joint account.
She suspected a scam and when she ignored it she got lots of indecent phone calls. The police were involved. This turned out not to be someone abroad but a local who had a link to the funeral parlour and had treated other grieving relatives in the same way.

I disagree.
I think we are all vulnerable at some time or another, depending on cicumstances/state of mind.

Most scams are well known and well publicised and, usually, pretty amateur. Those emails telling you someone you barely know is stranded in a some foreign country and had all their money and papers stolen and to send them money. it is perfectly clear that someone's contact list has been raided and you happen to be in it.

Emails from your children, saying they have lost their phones etc, when you know that if that happened they would be highly unlikely to contact you in the way these emails do.

My father lived into his mid-90s, sound in mind. In the months before his death he was inundated with letters saying he had won a lottery somewhere. Just send £1,000 for administration. He recognised them for what they were and just threw them away. He read a paper everyday and kept himself up to date and had read about these scams.

There is no good reason why so many of those people, who are mentally fully aware should fall so frequently for these popular and well known scams. It is usually driven by the idea of getting something for nothing, a windfall. But even if a windfall would change your life. Common sense should tell you that you get 'owt for nowt', a well known saying and they should check it out very carefully.

Obviously if someone devises a deep and complex scam and only does it infrequently enough for it not to be picked up and publicised by financial or consumer journalists then we areall at risk. But this isn't what happens. Scammers are lazy and are just looking for quick money, so use the same trick time and time again because there are enough culpably ignorant and foolish people around.

Protecting the cognitively vulnerable is a seperate issue

Miss A. Sorry to hear that. Just despicable.

investing money successfully

A friend of mine invested a few thousand with a 'company' who phoned her and sent a brochure in the post.
She received a 'dividend' and happily invested some more money.
Fortunately she told family about it and they prevented it going any further.
This was several years ago, before banks made so many checks.

MissA that was a despicable thing for someone to do.

A friend of mine lost £20k when investing her mother’s money, despite both she and her husband doing phone checks etc. She said she couldn’t believe how clever and devious these scammers are. She and her husband were both completely taken in, I don’t know at what point they realised what had happened, they’d been investing money successfully for years.

Makes you wonder, doesnt it?

I bank with Santander and routinely have to transfer money abroad to pay for auctions and purchases for my business. I now have to go through several layers which require me to state what the money is for (a good or service) and where the money is coming from.

On one occasion I was transfering only 1000 euros to a German bank (we were still in the EU) and the intermediate bank (Barclays) sent me a series of questions I had to answer, I also had to send them a copy of the auction invoice for the goods.

I realise this is more about prevention of money laundering than possible scams but it makes me wonder how people get to be able to transfer really large sums internationally without one bank or another querying it.

I often used to find my mum in the middle of a chat with some phone person.
They would be asking after the family by name, and telling her they had been praying for my daughter.
All info she had given, but she was lonely and spent hours alone.
She welcomed someone to show some interest.

It really upset me to think people would sink that low, but it shows that if they catch someone at the right time, then just maybe they might strike lucky.

It's only because I'm such an old skinflint that I didn't just pay.

This happened to me with a man who was one of the customers of my online business. He presented himself as a celebrity hairdresser and stylist and purchased a few items. Not unusual as I work with a lot of film and theatre people in the USA. We gradually got chatting and found we had a lot in common. It was not a romantic relationship - more an online friendship. We chatted about books, travel, music and so on.

After a couple of months of on and off chat Don (as he called himself) told me his mom was ill and needed an operation. However his business was in trouble.... This immediately threw up a red flag with me and I tried to edge away from the subject. I was about to close my shops for 4 weeks vacation when he came out and asked me to lend him $50,000. I told him I will need to see my accountant. You cant just transfer that amount international or the bank will investigate.

My nephew showed me how to do a reverse image search and we found a scam site with pictures of "Don". Only he had many names and occupations including pilot, surgeon, and army officer. He had conned several women out of thousands of dollars. Needless to say I broke off all communication immediately and blocked his emails at deep server level and his phone number. I still accept international calls by arrangement only.

I consider myself hard and sharp in business but can understand how easy it is for a person to be beguiled into a relationahip where you trust the other implicitly.

People dont get trust from me. They earn it - over yers.

MissAdventure

I had a call from a "solicitor" just after my girl died, telling me they had been hired to recoup money owed by her to the water company.
Somebody them told me that these people can look up death notices and scam relatives into paying off "debts".

That is absolutely abhorrent. So sorry you had to go through that????

I had a call from a "solicitor" just after my girl died, telling me they had been hired to recoup money owed by her to the water company.
Somebody them told me that these people can look up death notices and scam relatives into paying off "debts".

Serendipity22

I had a WhatsApp message which began Hi mum, I dropped my old phone in water and now it doesnt work ( or words to that effect ) I have an invoice to pay, can you lend me the money -, blah blah blah. So considering I have 2 AC, it could have been from either, BUT my radar was on red alert by the wording on the message.

I knew my DD hadn't changed her number, so that left my DS, like i say, the wording set my radar off.

Anyway, to cut long story short, they didn't get a penny from me, but some poor, unsuspecting person would have fallen for the cock 'n' bull message....

Makes my blood boil

I had exactly the same scam about three months ago and I was getting sucked into it but then after a little bit I’ve got suspicious and I said tell me the names of your two brothers, (scammer was purporting to be my daughter) obviously he/she couldn’t tell me got very annoyed and hung up…?

I recently had a phone call from a very well-spoken gentleman going by the name of Lewis. He said that he was from Barclays fraud department and asked me questions about payments that had been made using my debit card, none of which I had made. Eventually, he told me that this could easily be sorted out by me using my banking app. He would run me through what to do. At this point, I refused and told him that I would ring the bank's fraud department. He then tried to tell me that I would only end up speaking to him. When I spoke to the bank's fraud department (using a different phone) it was confirmed to be a con. Unbelievably a week later he phoned again, my response wasn't very ladylike.

I asked on here once if I had been nearly scammed.

I used to pay my mobile bill using the ee app, which was always buffering and didnt always work the first time.
Immediately after paying, I got a text from ee saying that my payment hadnt gone through and asking me to re enter my details.

I very nearly did it.

I was scammed a couple of months ago.A “police officer” did the blurb ….I did not believe him and asked for his number and his senior.They put me through to a”police “ station and confirmed they were genuine.NOT.All part of the scam.I nearly lost £20.000 .I am not gullible and intelligent but nearly fell for this.Beware.Don’t trust anyone asking for money.
Barbarax

I had to have very serious words with the salvation army and tell them to leave my mum alone.
She had made a one off donation, then they were virtually hounding her.

Judging by the number of “ charities” that phoned my mum to ask for money via a direct debit, my mum was definitely on a suckers list. When we became aware of these calls, mum had early Alzheimer’s and believed everything she was told on the phone.

We had to put in several layers of protection to stop these evil people.

I think anybody is at risk of being caught out, given the right circumstances, story, and scammers.

It obviously works well enough that the scammers keep hatching more and more schemes to stay one step ahead.

Given the chance, they are master manipulators.

Some people in our family have had that WhatsApp Serendipity. Fortunately they had been warned that it was going around.

I had a WhatsApp message which began Hi mum, I dropped my old phone in water and now it doesnt work ( or words to that effect ) I have an invoice to pay, can you lend me the money -, blah blah blah. So considering I have 2 AC, it could have been from either, BUT my radar was on red alert by the wording on the message.

I knew my DD hadn't changed her number, so that left my DS, like i say, the wording set my radar off.

Anyway, to cut long story short, they didn't get a penny from me, but some poor, unsuspecting person would have fallen for the cock 'n' bull message....

Makes my blood boil

I am sorry to see anyone in distress, but when I hear these scam stories, so often underlying it all is greed or unreasonable gullibleness.

The internet has been around now for 30 years, when many of those now scammed were in their late 40s and 50s and in the intervening period the dangers of these scams and how they work have been written about extensively been in the papers, on the radio and on tv. you need to work really hard not to have seen them and been aware of them.

We all have a responsibility to keep ourselves safe, whether in the house, do not put an electric fire on the side of the bath, in case it falls in, outside, do not balance a chair on a table to change a light bulb, do not drive the wrong way down a one way street and that includes being aware of people trying to part you from your money. People had clever schemes to get your money that were advertised in newspapers and sold door to door well before the internet appeared.

Obviously I exclude people who are cognitively challenged, in my criticism, that is different,

It is up to all of us to use our common sense and make sure we are informed of what is happening in the outside world. Its threads and dangers and you do not have to be a technological whizz kid to have this knowledge and act on it.

It's just awful and it seems to be getting worse. These scammers are just so convincing. You need to watch out for fake websites too. It's never ending.

These stories really upset me. How these evil people sleep at night I don’t know but I hope they pay for their greed 10 times over.