![Fraud now makes up almost HALF of reported crime - how to avoid getting scammed](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/07/12/14/87253307-0-image-a-3_1720789913511.jpg)
Over six per cent of people in England and Wales were the victim of fraud during the period, more than double the three per cent that experienced vehicle related theft, and three times that of victims of criminal damage or bicycle theft.
Malware - or malicious software - is helping to fuel a murky underworld of bank card theft on the dark web, it has been revealed. Criminals are selling software programs to other criminals which allow them to more easily harvest unsuspecting victims' personal card details - often on 'subscriptions' costing as little as £80 per month.
Millions of bank account details could be at risk of sale to cyber criminals after Santander became the target of a cyber attack by hacking group ShinyHunters. Last month's hack, which preceded a similar attack on Ticketmaster, has led to data relating to all of the European lender's 210,000 staff, as well as millions of its customers, being compromised.
Britons are gearing up for the summer and events like Glastonbury and the Euros are just around the corner. But criminals are also planning their own summer bonanza, as these packed events are ripe with opportunities to steal unassuming victims' phones. In the past, criminals would steal a phone to sell on for a quick profit - but today, they are more interested in using it to gain access to your bank account. Here's what you can do to make sure thieves don't drain your money.
As with our debit and credit cards, we expect some level of security when we hand over our details to supermarkets. Sadly, some Sainsbury's customers can't say the same. We have written about many instances where Sainsbury's customers have their Nectar points stolen. Why won't the supermarket do anything about it?
In December, I was mugged and had my phone stolen while on a night out. Around £3,900 was transferred from my savings account to my Revolut account, where I believe it was used to buy cryptocurrency. I reported all of this to the police and to Revolut, but it has declined to reimburse me, saying I 'authorised' the transactions. The money taken was my entire savings. I have just moved out of my parents' house in to my own place and without it I'm starting to struggle financially.
Customers of Booking.com have told how they lost money after falling for a convincing fraud perpetrated through the website's messaging app. As previously reported by This is Money, the hotel and short let website's messaging system has been infiltrated by scammers, who tell customers that they need to pay additional fees to secure their booking and pocket the cash.
In a car park somewhere on the rugged Cornish coast, a Ghanaian scammer stands shivering and confused. He has been sent here to collect the payment for 10kg of non-existent gold promised to the victim of one of his scams. The fraudster is expecting to get £234,000 in cash. It's a massive sum, by far outweighing the costs of the 6,000 mile round trip from the Ghanaian capital, Accra. But, he has been tricked by a new wave of scambaiters. Here, two scambaiters tell us their favourite techniques - and how to stay safe from scams.
App stores are nothing if not unwieldy beasts. Every month, thousands of apps are added to the Google Play Store, with 62,000 apps added to the platform in November 2023 alone. Likewise, the Apple App Store saw 38,000 apps added during the same month. Unsurprisingly, with such high volumes of content, apps masquerading as legitimate can, and do, slip through the net. While the best advice is to stick to official app stores when downloading apps, it appears that this is by no means a foolproof method.
It can take less than six hours to hack 90 per cent of passwords, according to research, leaving your online identity, personal data, and bank accounts just clicks away from any hacker worth their salt. But depressingly the two most common passwords remain 'password' and '123456'. Here's how to best keep yourself cyber secure in 2024.
Scammers continue to ride roughshod over the law, targeting people with phone calls, text messages, emails, social media requests and even letters. Some are easy to spot from a mile off, with many of us having been contacted by a Nigerian prince in need of help reclaiming his lost inheritance, or received a poorly-worded email warning that at least 574 viruses have been detected on our PCs. However, the vast majority are not quite so easy to spot, and fraudsters are coming up with new ones all the time. According to research from Which? shared exclusively with This is Money, there are five new scams that people should keep a keen eye out for this year.
Customers booking holiday accommodation on the website Booking.com are urged to be aware of scammers impersonating genuine hotels. We have seen messages from fraudsters which appeared on the site's secure messaging portal, asking them to make payments to secure a reservation. This is similar to a previous scam reported in October 2023, when a number of travellers also said they had received fraudulent messages asking for payment.
Shoppers have been warned about the purchase scams to watch out for in 2024 by Lloyds Bank. Thousands of people hunting for tickets, cars, pets, and much more were tricked into handing money over to fraudsters this year, with purchase scams soaring by 42 per cent compared to last year. These are the biggest scams shoppers need to watch out for in 2024.
More than 5,400 hopeful tenants have been scammed out of deposits for non-existent rental properties in the past year, according to Action Fraud. With tenants facing huge competition to secure homes, fraudsters have flooded social media with dodgy adverts and fake property listings to exploit the red-hot rental market.
Motorists have been urged to take extra caution when searching for their insurer online as there is a new breed of 'claims hijackers' on the loose who will try to rob them of thousands of pounds. The Insurance Fraud Bureau say there has already been countless cases of vulnerable people every day targeted by scammers who use paid advert spoof websites to appear at the top of Google and other search engines to dupe unwitting drivers into thinking they will be redirected to the site of the genuine insurer. People looking to make a claim can inadvertently contact one of these third-party sites via an ad and think they're dealing with their provider, only to be trapped in legal agreements with unknown firms and facing costs of up to £50,000.
Reporter Jessica Beard (pictured) delivered a letter to the Prime Minister yesterday, calling on him to force social media firms to crack down on scammers operating on their platforms. In a rare show of unity, officials from eight of the UK's largest banks and building societies joined us to set out the urgent action we believe tech companies must take to protect their users from criminals.
Britons lost more than half a billion pounds to criminals through fraud in the first six months of this year, according to new figures. Criminals stole £580million through fraud according to a new report by UK Finance. This amounts to one theft by fraudsters every 12 seconds. Social media continues to play a huge part in the rampant problem of fraud, with three-quarters of fraud starting online.
The 'resteal' is a con that sees unsuspecting second-hand car buyers purchase a cloned vehicle, only to have it stolen just days later by the very people who sold it to them, according to the motor insurance loss adjustment firm Claims Management & Adjusting. It says criminals then move on to their next victim and repeat the dishonest trick using the same vehicle, with the identity changed yet again. The firm has provided its top five tips to avoid falling for the swindle.
This is Money is part of the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday & Metro media group
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