Thames Valley Alerts: Scams and Bike Register

As so many more people are now into cycling, it is important that all owners of bikes register them online to www.bikeregister.com as besides helping to get your bike back if stolen and found abandoned, it also helps with finding out your identity if you are involved in an accident on your bike.

Information received from Which on Friday:

Criminals stole £30,000 from a vulnerable 89-year-old customer in a sophisticated and drawn-out impersonation scam. Her bank, Lloyds, initially refused to reimburse these losses, despite being signed up to a voluntary code that has introduced significant new protection for fraud victims. Reports of authorised push payment (APP) fraud – where the victim is tricked into moving the money into a scammer’s account – jumped by 45% in 2019 and resulted in losses of £456m. Most payments are made via online banking, but there has been a 177% spike in APP scams initiated via mobile banking apps and a 40% spike in those started in branches. Read more in this article:

https://www.which.co.uk/news/2020/06/scammers-pose-as-the-national-crime-agency-to-steal-30000-from-lloyds-customer/

This is Scam Awareness Week and Citizen Advice Bureau have an article on Scams in the following attachment:

https://conversation.which.co.uk/money/citizens-advice-scams-awareness-fortnight/?utm_source=whichcouk&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=scamalert190620

There are so many scams at the moment by phone and email including Paypal, Sky, HMRC, Netflix, TV Licensing and again many calls with a recorded message saying they are from Amazon regarding Amazon Prime and they are using various numbers. More details below on the Amazon scam:

Criminals are targeting members of the public with automated calls stating that the recipient has been charged for an Amazon Prime subscription or that a fraudster has used their personal details to sign up for this. The victim is then instructed to press 1 to cancel the transaction and when they do this, they are connected to a scammer posing as an Amazon Customer Services representative. The criminal tells the victim the Amazon Prime subscription was purchased fraudulently and that they need remote access to the victim’s computer in order to fix a security flaw that will prevent it from happening again. The victim is instructed to download an application called Team Viewer and asked to log onto their online banking account, which then gives the criminal access to all their personal and financial details.