Scam Alert

I've been aware of them for at least 15 years normally a Liverpudlian or Mancunian accent at the end of the phone..... haven't heard from them for a couple of years.... never bothered speaking to them just put them on speakerphone and take the Mick out of them whilst they waste their time and money 

Hi Kathryn

I'm afraid this is as old as the hills and a long established business scam that won't go away. You can get a flavour of the history from a post that started in 2011

Charity and Police Magazine Advertising SCAMS

For some reason the North East is the home to these scams. Over the years we have actively fought them, worked with Trading Standards and the Police, but they are like a multi headed beast and re-appear months later under a new name.

Trading Standards and the Police have their hands tied trying to chase these scams, mainly from reduced resource and reality you can't really stop it.

Only way it will stop is for business owners to wise up, but unfortunately with thousands of brand new businesses every year its rich pickings, as someone who fell for it myself 10 years ago, there are plenty of naive and rooky business owners 

In nutshell though, never agree to anything from a cold call, do 5 mins worth of research and if interested, phone THEM back. If you can't, they won't give you a number or try pressure sales, hangup and move on.

Just need to somehow communicate this to every single new business owner and this scam will naturally die. Unfortunately looking at the date of my original post, it shows no sign of dying off anytime soon... 

I am already aware of this. Because some of my friends had already got this call saying claiming to be police or police federation. But when they understand about this. They aren't interested anymore. And share this news with me.

This is an old one!

Another more recent is PayPal.  I've received a couple of "payment notifications" to a John MacKenzie.  Took a while for PayPal to send me their free UK phone number so that I could discuss this with them.   They are aware of it and I've closed my account as a precaution but I know that some of you may not be able to do that.  

The e-mails look legit until you read the "from" e-mail address.  

This is my favourite one I've had recently. They are actually getting better visually, but the little scammers just can't spell!

What they need is a proofreader, there's a whole new market out there for you Rebecca 

I had that one the other day and another from CPS enforcement ltd for parking on private land.... Apparently they got the vehicle details from DVLA..... Which is a bit odd as the vehicles I currently have belong to Enterprise....... I assume the link takes you to a payment site? Never bothered to click the link myself........

Originally Posted by Barney

“I assume the link takes you to a payment site? Never bothered to click the link myself........

 ”

Never click it, it will be either payment or a malware link. By sheer co-incidence the first one of these I had was a day when Clive had a couple of meetings in London, so nearly caught me out. 

If they spell checked and used a more plausible link, you'd be more likely to fall for it. Hmm maybe a new arm for the business, scammer consultancy?