FOLLOWING a recent incident brought to their attention by staff at a local post office, Cornwall Trading Standards Officers are warning the public about a scam relating to PPI (payment protection insurance) refunds.

Truro Post Office raised the alarm when one of their customers came in asking to buy Ukash vouchers in order to secure a PPI refund. A concerned member of staff rang Trading Standards and the customer was advised that it was a scam.

 Scammers had targeted the potential victim by telephone, offering her a £2,000 refund for PPI charges. She was contacted on several occasions, which helped build trust in the process. Eventually she was convinced to buy Ukash vouchers to the value of £200 as an administration fee. The scammers promised that a courier would arrive later that day to collect the vouchers and hand over her money.

Senior Trading Standards officer Gary Webster commented: ‘There was no chance that anyone would have arrived at the lady’s home to hand over the cash. The scammers would have simply rung her and asked her to provide the Ukash voucher codes to confirm payment of the admin fee. Using the codes they then would have been able to withdraw the cash.

‘We are really grateful to the staff at the Post Office for noticing this and bringing the matter to our attention. This type of scam is so incredibly simple but the technique used by the scammers to cover their tracks is often very sophisticated. Local or national telephone numbers can easily be diverted to pay-as-you-go mobile phones or to telephones based outside of the UK.

‘The scammers will often use company names of real businesses that are entirely unconnected. This gives the victim some reassurance if they happen to search online to see if the company actually exists.

‘Ukash and other money transfer schemes offer a convenient method of securely transferring money between people, but there are dangers with this that can be exploited by fraudsters. The recipient does not need any physical paperwork — they only need the code, which they can use to redeem for cash at any participating outlets (usually local shops, post offices or supermarkets). In many cases they may even only need part of the code, as some of the digits purely relate to the country of origin. There is no method of recovering monies that are sent in this way.’

Mr Webster added:?‘Last month was National Scams Awareness Month and we are keen to get the message out to people that they need to be very wary of cold calls. We have seen lots of other versions of this scam, including one that purported to offer substantial compensation to consumers who had previously been caught by timeshare scams.

‘I’m aware of someone who lost over £17,000 over a two week period, and another person who lost many tens of thousands to a variety of different telephone scams over a period of months. The scammers will effectively ‘groom’ their victim, spending time over numerous phone calls to build trust, before eventually disappearing with the money.’

Cornwall Council is also warning residents about bogus callers who are claiming to be ringing on behalf of the Council, offering refunds for over-payment of Council Tax.

 A number of local residents have reported that scammers, apparently from a business calling itself ‘Claimers’ are stating that they will refund the over-payment, provided a £65 fee is paid in advance.

If you need to verify the identity of a Cornwall staff member please call 0300 1234 100. Alternatively please seek advice from Citizens’ Advice Consumer Service on 03454 04 05 06. or to report the matter to Action Fraud phone 0300 123 20 40.