Incidents of online fraud have accelerated rapidly since the covid pandemic, according to fraud experts. Last year one in seventeen UK adults were victims of fraud, with the crime accounting for three point two million offences each year. To tell us more, and give advice on how we can avoid it, is Simon Horswell from ONFIDO.
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00:00 Before COVID you had the situation where you'd heard about someone who'd received one of
00:06 those scam emails, or you'd heard about people receiving an SMS that told you to go to a
00:13 certain link or told you that something had been frozen or you were in trouble. So now
00:16 we have much higher frequency of these things taking place online. Instead of it being that
00:23 you'd heard of someone who'd experienced one of these things, I think many of us receive
00:28 phone calls from a recorded message or text messages that claim to be from customs or
00:34 tax quite frequently now.
00:37 Fraud accounts for around 40% of all crime in England and Wales, with an estimated cost
00:42 of fraud to society sitting at £6.8 billion, according to the Crime Survey for England
00:47 and Wales year ending September 2023. Scams that target people online have increased in
00:53 prevalence since the coronavirus pandemic, say experts like Simon, who works as the head
00:57 of fraud for tech company Onfido.
01:00 Now it's come to the point where government's actually starting a campaign. And I think
01:04 this is a great campaign because the biggest problem we have with fraud is awareness. It's
01:09 people not being aware because they're not switched onto the same social media channels
01:14 as other people. So the most vulnerable people are those who are the least aware. And they're
01:20 probably the most naive in these situations as well.
01:23 A particular concern is that fraudsters, they're always coming up with new ways to try and
01:28 catch us out. How can we try our best to sort of stay on top of things and avoid harm?
01:33 If something is too good to be true, it generally is. And that's how these things work. So there's
01:38 going to be an unsolicited call or message, something that's come out of the blue. And
01:45 it will either entice you to some amazing offer that's going on, that sounds amazing,
01:52 it's just fantastic. You'll get this amount of return. The money comes back so quickly.
01:57 It'll probably be supported by some kind of story where someone says, I did it and look
02:01 how well off I am. And what we're seeing at the moment is people using the faces of celebrities
02:06 to try and endorse these products, which are just scams.
02:10 So it's an unsolicited contact of some nature that has a link held within it. And that link
02:16 is going to be the key. So that's how they get you to move away from something that you
02:20 know and can trust to where they want you to be.
02:23 Fraud affected one in 17 adults last year and one in five businesses over a three-year
02:28 period. Yet still, for many people, feelings of shame or embarrassment follow. The advice
02:34 from the experts is to always tell someone if you've fallen victim to consumer fraud,
02:39 as this is what keeps other people from doing the same.
02:41 I think one of the best places you can reach out to is Action Fraud. So that's actionfraud.police.uk.
02:49 That's a great place for reporting crime. It helps other people. It means you can get
02:53 all the details down and then alerts can be sent out to people and it'd be made public
02:57 so everyone's aware of it. And it may even be that they can help you in retrieving some
03:01 of those funds that you've lost as well.
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