Too good to be true

At the recent Solicitors for the Elderly and Action on Elder Abuse conference about safeguarding issues, I was particularly interested in a presentation by the Metropolitan police about scams. If you haven’t got a copy, I recommend downloading the Little Book of Big Scams, now in its second edition, which contains nicely presented and easily digested information about the schemes that result in vulnerable people – the majority of whom are elderly – losing significant sums of money.

I hadn’t appreciated how well organised these scams were. It seems astonishing that anyone would hand over their PIN then their bank card to someone who has called them claiming to be from the police. But I’m not older, I’m not vulnerable, I’m not lonely, and I’m not easily confused by technology and jargon.

I have, however, seen mass-market scam mail in action when a client wasn’t entirely coping with her post. I went to see her every other week to help out and keep an eye on whether her enduring power of attorney ought to be registered (a partner at my firm was her attorney). On one visit, I simply dealt with letters about foreign lottery wins as junk mail and binned them.

She was getting these on a regular basis having already replied to one. Her name was therefore on what the Met call a ‘suckers list’. As well as mail, she received a lot of telephone calls about how to claim her ‘winnings’.

Fortunately, my client did not end up in the hideous situation that Jessica, whose story can be found on the Think Jessica website, did. This is only because I persuaded her that the letters and calls she was receiving were too good to be true, and that she had been tricked out of her money. It still took a number of steps to reduce her exposure to the contact she was getting, though.

Registering with the Telephone Preference Service didn’t work. My client was very good about calling me or my secretary after she received a suspicious call (we had a laminated note by the side of her phone telling her what to say if she didn’t know the caller). In the end, we asked BT to change her number. This took nearly an hour of calls and incurred a fee (£24.99 at the time) but it was worth it.

And the Mailing Preference Service doesn’t always work when letters are sent from abroad, which is why most of these scams relate to foreign lotteries. My client agreed to have her post redirected to our office for six months, and we sent on everything other than the correspondence that looked to be about prizes and once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. I sent the scam letters to Royal Mail, Freepost, Scam Mail, PO Box 797, Exeter EX1 9UN.

I reported the payment that had been made by my client to Action Fraud.

Also, I made another laminated note stating that if anyone said they were from the police or were lawyers who would help reclaim her money, she had to ask them to call me: apparently there is even such a thing as ‘fraud recovery fraud’.

My client was lucky. She only lost £500, and she had people on hand to advise and help her before things got too bad. If my client refused to believe me, or hadn’t got anybody looking out for her, it could have been a very different story.

Sofia Tayton is a partner and head of care and capacity at Lodders Solicitors

She writes the regular in-practice article on care and capacity for Private Client Adviser