Conmen have targeted Barclays customers over Christmas by trying to persuade them to hand over their account details.The emails carry the Barclays logo and ask customers to fill in confidential information. They even have a link to the bank’s online help page, complete with customer services numbers, and allow the user to return to Barclays’ home page.
Once armed with a customer’s surname, account number, five-digit password and memorable word, the conmen could access accounts.
Barclays warned yesterday that it would never ask any of its 14million account holders for personal details by email and warned anyone who receives the email not to fill in the details. (Duh!)
From the good old Office of Fair Trading (OFT) in the UK this time.
No ‘TOTP’ type chart rundown this time with information that everyone knows (or ought to know) already – this is a report based in real information.
The report that says that UK consumers are losing £3.5 billion (presumably 3 thousand, five hundred million, rather than the old British definition) to scams each year.
These are the areas they looked at:
1. prize draw/sweepstake scams
2. foreign lottery scams
3. work at home and business opportunity scams
4. premium rate telephone prize scams
5. miracle health and slimming cure scams
6. African advance fee frauds/foreign money making scams
7. clairvoyant/psychic mailing scams
8. property investor scams
9. pyramid selling and chain letter scams
10. bogus holiday club scams
11. Internet dialer scams
12. career opportunity (model/author/inventor) scams
13. high risk investment scams
14. Internet matrix scheme scams
15. loan scams
They claim this is the first detailed analysis of the financial impact and harm caused by such scams. The survey involved over 11,200 interviews and found that each year 1 in 15 people in the UK are a victim of scams. The avergage loss per scam was £850 ($1600).
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