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I'm very wary about letting people such as utilities representatives into my house. Recently we had a man come to 'read the meters'. I asked for ID and he brandished the badge he had around his neck on a lanyard. This read that he represented Morrisons, a company that must be subcontracted to do the readings. As he had the necessary key to open the external box to our electricity meter I assumed he was bona fide. The gas meter is indoors so he had to access my home. I thought afterwards that it is probably not difficult to obtain one of the keys to utilities boxes (we have one of our own) and that anyone could fake a badge. It turned out he was genuine but should I have been more cautious? How careful should one be without appearing paranoid?

I've been reading about Open Banking. I can see that for some people, it could be useful to allow various companies to use banking transactions, to search for better deals on utilities for example.
I'm assuming this won't pose any security threat, however, I can see that my data is now becoming a commodity.
I'm not too keen on sharing my data at the moment, but that could change. Are there any steps I can take to make sure I'm safe if I chose to share?

Three nights ago my autistic 13 yr old grandson saw a pop up on the computer saying you have a virus phone this number. He did. Later he was very upset and told us,about it. All he can tell us is the call lasted 18 mins, he gave them all our passwords and he had to press the keys on the computer. We have changed the passwords. What are they actually after with this and what else can we do now?

How can we best protect against identity theft?

It happened to a friend several years ago and she was shocked to the core that it could have happened, and then devastated at the amount of time and effort required to sort things out.

Many thanks.