The Chartered Trading Standards Institute (CTSI) has warned previous victims of scams to avoid being duped by a letter pretending to be from the professional body.
Fraudsters are sending mail to customers and businesses with CTSI-headed paper in an attempt to gain recipients’ banking information.
The latest scam involves a letter which states the Trading Standards has caught insurance scammers and to assist the investigation, recipients are told to fill in a ‘creditors debt form.’
This purports to be part of a compensation scheme but it is instead a ploy to access personal details of potential victims. Cynical fraudsters have even drawn up a ‘target list’ to aim the con at those who have been duped by scams before.
A reported £16,000 has been lost through the scam, according to one Local Trading Standards Authority. But while evidence is gathered and many scams go unreported, the body fears that figure could be the tip of the iceberg, with potentially least ten times more cash being taken from the public.
Fraudsters have ‘no limitations’ on how far they will go
As recent data found Brits have lost £7.5bn to scams in the last 12 months, there is major concern at the rate of these crimes in the UK.
The CTSI chief executive, John Herriman, said: “These scammers show no sign of slowing down and although Trading Standards are working hard to take action against these despicable individuals, it is important that the public are on guard and do not respond to letters or emails that appear to be from genuine organisations, like CTSI.
“Trading Standards are the very people that protect the public, so to see scams targeting our good name in this way is appalling and we want to raise as much awareness about this as possible to stop consumers being defrauded out of their hard-earned cash.
“We often see fraudsters impersonating trusted brands to deceive the public but impersonating the very essence of those that protect consumers by pretending to be Trading Standards is disgusting and shows that these criminals have no limitations to how far they are willing to go to defraud people of their savings.”
