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 | You and Yours - Transcript ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio 4 |
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| TX: 07.05.04 – NEW MOVES TO END COMPETITION SCAMS PRESENTER: WINIFRED ROBINSON |
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| THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE ´óÏó´«Ã½ CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY ROBINSON New intelligent sharing arrangements have been agreed between the Office of Fair Trading here and its sister organisations in Canada and America. The aim is to try to cut down on competition scams based in those countries but targeting citizens here in the UK, particularly elderly people who are considered to be more trusting. One of our listeners - Alison - discovered when she was staying at the home of her father, who was 90 and in hospital, that he had been sending off regular payments to try to claim a promised prize. ALISON They were offering large prizes, in terms of thousands of pounds that would be yours, if you sent a cheque for £10, 20, sometimes even more than that. And there's usually quite a lot of blurb about if you just send us £10 we will send you £300,000 by return. And it uses the person's name and their address quite a lot to make it feel very personalised. And I discovered that my father had been sending them back in the hopes that he was going to win something. ROBINSON Alison discovered that her father had in fact parted with hundreds of pounds over a two year period. ALISON When I challenged him about it he said - Oh it's just a little gamble, it's no worse than the lottery, I've only sent off 10 or £20 which obviously was not true but I had to look into his financial matters and found cheque stubs and his bank statements going back about two years, I managed to identify cheques going out pretty well every week in that space of time to various different organisations. My reaction to these envelopes is disgust because I think people are just taking advantage of - especially elderly people probably who haven't got very much to do and maybe not much money and would like a bit more. ROBINSON Well Mike Haley is head of International Consumer Protection at the Office of Fair Trading. It sounds, from that story, as though Alison's father was in fact being targeted by more than one group of competition scammers - does that really happen? HALEY Yes unfortunately it does and Alison's story, unfortunately, is far too common, almost every week I receive a letter or a phone call from someone who is in the same circumstances. And they often send us the mailings that are being sent to them over a period and we now monitor between two and three hundred of these different competitions from Canada, America, Australia which are in circulation in the UK. ROBINSON So who is doing this? HALEY Well behind the most deceptive and fraudulent of these mailings - and they are frauds because there is no prize - are criminals, criminal gangs in Canada mainly but also some in America and Australia, are using these mailings which are very persuasive, very professionally printed to target people in the UK and especially the elderly to steal their money. ROBINSON And once you do send off some money you're tempted to actually have a go, you believe then that they share information between them? HALEY Yes very much so. Once you send off to one of them - and we've tested this out, in fact I've actually sent one of these off myself - you start to be receiving more and more of these letters. Your information is like gold dust to them because if they think you are susceptible to these type of prize draws and competitions they put you on what they call a succour list - it's a hit list of those who think they can get more money out of. They consider you a succour if you send money off to these, in fact you are a victim and you shouldn't be embarrassed about this because if you have become a victim it's because they are very persuasive. ROBINSON Now you say you're dealing with three or four hundreds of these every week, do you have any idea of the scale of it nation wide? HALEY Yes last year we had a campaign with the Department of Trade and Industry where we put posters in post offices and other places, especially where elderly people went to, and we received 12,000 different pieces of mail within about three months of those posters coming in and that's how we identified that there were between two and three hundred different competition fraudulent mailings in circulation. ROBINSON So how much money are we talking about here? HALEY Well we estimate that people can be sending off between a hundred and a hundred and fifty million pounds a year to these scams. Now we estimate that through where we have intercepted mailings that have been going out of the UK and in one particular case DHL had intercepted one of these mailings which had gone into a post office box in the UK and then sent out to Canada and when we looked through those mailings there was 18 different types of mailings and there was £900 in cash and thousands of pounds in cheques from all over the UK and from all types of people. ROBINSON So this agreement that you've now struck to share intelligence with consumer protection bodies in America and Canada how do you believe that's going to help? HALEY Well because most of these mailings originate in Canada and America but the victims are in the UK we need to get our heads together. And what's happened with these new protocols is that it streamlines the processes for exchanging information, for ensuring that we're targeting the most prolific of these mailings and that we provide evidence to law enforcement in Canada and America so they can close them down and close them down quickly. ROBINSON Has that happened yet? HALEY There has been some successes and in Canada one of these mailings - there's been charges brought against the individuals and when they took a search warrant out they found that there was 50 million Canadian dollars worth of mailings had actually returned from the UK, which again shows you the scale of this problem. They're having success but we must work harder and these information protocols means that we can be quicker, more streamlined and more effective together. ROBINSON Does anyone ever get their money back? HALEY Occasionally we have successes where there's intercepted mail in the UK and we will return that money or we would ask for the mail carriers to return that money. But unfortunately it's far too rare, to catch up with these people is very difficult and the best thing is not to send money off in the first place. ROBINSON Mike Haley thank you very much. Back to the You and Yours homepage The ´óÏó´«Ã½ is not responsible for external websites |
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