As usual, today,
we held “Coffee Pot,” our Thursday morning coffee group, mainly frequented by
older citizens. At it, we were visited by PCSO (Police Community Support
Officer) Nad Ikram, who gave a PowerPoint illustrated talk on “Telephone and
Postal Fraud.”
He talked about
the importance of always being suspicious, whether of telephone calls (the
commonest), email or web announcements, unsolicited letters, or individuals on the
doorstep. If an offer was too good to be true – it wasn’t true. He discussed,
and showed a video, of some of the commonest scams and warned people to give away
the minimum of data and never to reveal PIN numbers, or the three CSV numbers
on the backs of credit cards.
He also
described scams where people were told they had a fraudulent financial problem and
encouraged to ring their bank, only for the fraudsters not to hang up, but to
still be on the line when the individual thought they were talking to their
bank – and trustingly revealed just the information that the fraudsters wanted.
He warned that sometimes the (bogus) bank would send a courier for the person’s
cards, which would never be seen again – apart from a large withdrawal on their
statement.
Hopefully, we
have all learned lessons. Thank you Nad.
