What can you do if you've been scammed and what are the government's new plans?
Currently, across the UK, consumers are more likely to be victims of fraud than any other crime
Words by James Gray, ITV News Multimedia Producer
The fightback against scammers is stepping up, the government has said, with action to block fraudulent communications at their source and allow suspect payments to be delayed.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said the new fraud strategy will "take the fight" to criminals and ensure "justice is done".
But critics have warned the proposals are "too little, too late" and only deliver a "rebadging of existing national teams".
ITV News takes an in-depth look at exactly what the incoming changes involve.
What can you do if you've been scammed?
Citizens Advice says you should contact the police if you've transferred money to the scammer in the last 24 hours and/or the scammer is in your area.
The charity also advises you to write down the details of the scam (e.g. what information you shared, who you were in contact with and how you paid the money).
You can also report the scam to Citizens Advice itself, who will pass the details on to Trading Standards. Trading Standards will then decide whether to investigate.
What does the government's new strategy involve?
- Banning cold calls on all financial products
One of the big announcements to come out of the government's fraud strategy is banning cold calls on all financial products.
The change relates to insurance or sham cryptocurrency schemes, among others.
Currently, a ban is already in place that stops cold calls about pension products, but the government's plans will extend this to all financial products.
Once in force, people receiving a call offering them such products will know that it must be a scam, helping to stop people from falling victim to fraudsters trying to dupe them.
- Extending the power of banks
If a bank has suspicions about a payment it will be allowed to delay them from being processed for longer than what is currently permitted, so that each case can be investigated.
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Anne Larkin is one of a large number of people to fall victim to increasingly sophisticated methods of fraud. She lost nearly £500,000 after criminals conned her into making a number of payments, while she was mourning the death of her husband, Graham, in November 2019.
Four months after his death, Ms Larkin, from East Yorkshire, became a victim of so-called romance fraudsters when she took to social media to escape the isolation brought about by the first coronavirus lockdown.
Two men - one posing as a struggling soldier posted to Yemen and another as an actor involved in charitable work in the United States - started to send her messages.
Shortly after she began speaking to them, they began to ask for sums of cash, which overtime became larger. She eventually suspected fraud when she was asked to sell her house.
Speaking to ITV's Good Morning Britain, she said: "People say I were gullible. Yeah, maybe I was gullible, but... to me they were just people who I could talk to on an evening, who understood what I was going through."
"This has isolated me from everything and everyone," she added.
Anne Larkin shared her story with Good Morning Britain, saying the experience has left her isolated from 'everything and everyone'
- Clamping down on "spoofing"
Downing Street said it will work with Ofcom to use new technology to further clamp down on number "spoofing" - when scammers change their caller ID to disguise their identity from the person they are calling.
Consequently, fraudsters will not be able to impersonate legitimate UK phone numbers.
- Outlawing so-called "sim farms"
The government said it will also ban other devices or methods commonly harnessed by scammers to reach thousands of people at once - such as so-called "sim farms" - and review the use of mass texting services to keep these technologies out of the hands of criminals.
Sim farms are devices that can be loaded with hundreds of sim cards and are controlled from a computer. Fraudsters use them to send thousands of scam texts at once.
- Introducing a new system to report cases of fraud
To make it easier for victims to report fraud and rebuild confidence that cases are being dealt with properly, a new system, replacing the current Action Fraud service, the UK's fraud reporting centre, will be up and running within the year.
Backed by a £30 million investment, it will provide a simpler route for reporting fraud online, with reduced waiting times and an online portal to allow victims to get timely updates on the progress of their case, according to the government.
The improved service will also ensure victims' reports are acted upon more effectively.
- Creating a new National Fraud Squad
The team will overhaul how scams are investigated by taking a proactive, intelligence-led approach, backed by 400 new specialist investigators.
In the UK, 70% of fraud either starts overseas or has an international link, the government said, adding that it will work bilaterally to raise fraud as a key priority.
What has the government said?
The Home Office said that while law enforcement is devolved, measures agreed with industry will have a UK-wide benefit.
Collective issues will continue to be addressed collaboratively to maintain the UK's resilience against fraud, the department added.
Meanwhile, Home Secretary Suella Braverman called fraud a "blight on our country", which criminals use to "exploit people's trust and steal their life savings".
"It is vital we adopt a new approach to this threat. The fraud strategy outlines how we will use all levers available to us - through government, law enforcement, industry and international partners - to track down these criminals, intercept their scams and bring them to justice," she said.
Do the changes go far enough?
Martin Lewis, founder of MoneySavingExpert, said the measures represent a "good first step in the right direction", adding: "They should improve prevention and prosecution, but it will be slow going."
Labour's shadow attorney general, Emily Thornberry, said: "This has been billed as a fully-integrated blueprint to tackle the entirety of Britain's fraud crisis, yet it ignores the tens of billions being lost to fraud against businesses and the government, and relies on estimates of the cost of fraud to members of the public that are seven years out of date."
Elsewhere, the Liberal Democrats' home affairs spokesperson Alistair Carmichael said: "The Fraud Squad is just a drop in the ocean compared to what's needed to protect fraud victims."
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