Trust Based Lending

The email starts – “Apply now for a guarantor loan up to £15,000 from the UK’s leading guarantor loans company”.

“48.9% APR Representative”.

Can you believe that? – basically a 50% interest rate. One hundred times the Bank of England base rate

It goes on – “Wouldn’t it be great if you could borrow money based on the relationships that you have instead of your credit history? With a TFS Guarantor Loan you can do just that. A guarantor loan is an alternative way to borrow that can provide you with an affordable loan for any purpose based on trust instead of your credit score”.

“Everyone’s considered – providing you can afford the payments and have a guarantor who is a homeowner aged 18 – 78”.

So, you can borrow money as long as you have someone willing to pay the loan if you cannot. And if they cannot pay the loan then the company takes their home to sell off instead.

This is perfectly legal but morally quite wrong.

Don’t go for things like this.

May 9, 2016

The Miss Ayesha Gadaffi Scam

This email shows the level of stupidity of many scammers.

It reads

“I am Miss. Ayesha Gaddafi, one of the daughters of the embattled president of Libya, I am currently residing in one of the African Countries, unfortunately as a refugee. At the meantime, my family is the target of Western nations led by NATO who wants to destroy my father at all costs. Our investments and bank accounts in several countries are their targets to freeze.

I have been commissioned to contact an interested foreign investor/partner who will be able to take absolute control of part of the vast cash available (£35 million) for a possible investment in your country.

Therefore if you can maintain the high level of secrecy required in this project, kindly respond with the following information for details of

Your full names and address
Your private telephone and fax numbers
Your private email address
Age and profession

Best Regard,

Miss.Ayesha Gaddafi”

It’s nearly 4 years since Colonel Gadaffi died but still some moron thinks he should send out this old scam email. This is both ridiculous and pathetic.

May 7, 2016

Latest Time-Wasters

So, what rubbish emails and calls have there been to Brooklands Radio station in the last few days?

We received a series of emails that are bounce back messages as the email address was in error i.e. the email address they were sent to doesn’t exist or is over limit. How did this happen? We didn’t send the emails. Some scammer ‘spoofed’ our email address and sent out the messages. Spoofing means to make an email look like it came from someone else. This is very difficult to stop.

2. A message in French saying someone had left us a voice message on a site named kjiji. – Just a scam.

3. A message from Amazon saying our order has been dispatched, with a zip file to open. Yet another stupid scam message.

4. A message from a debt collection agency offering to collect our outstanding debts – we’re a volunteer organisation. No debts. But they didn’t bother to check of course, just fill the Internet with spam messages.

5. An email titled ‘The Quickest Way to Obtain Funds Generated From the Internet” from a Mackenzie Cremor (that’s a great fake name). The email is just a series of links to random websites. It looks like this spam is intended to tell if the email address is Live i.e. if they don’t get back an error message then they know it’s a real email address. Time-Wasters.

These people just waste our time and clog up the Internet with rubbish.

May 6, 2016

Pre-Paid Return Envelopes

Do you get those letters from finance companies saying you have been pre-approved for a loan or a credit card?

Often they have pre-paid return envelopes.

Now that’s an opportunity too good to miss.

Send it back to them complete with whatever other sales letters you got that day (don’t leave your address on anything though) or send them back folded sheets of newspaper or any rubbish to hand.

Or you can be creative – fill the envelope with confetti or shredded sales leaflets.

They pay the postage whatever the contents. It’s their envelope – you’re just returning it to them.

If we all return the envelopes then perhaps they’ll stop sending out the stupid letters that we don’t want.

May 5, 2016

The Car Park Kitchenware Scammer

A guest post by Jay

Jay says – My elderly neighbour was scammed in the car park at Painshill park.

He was approached by a Swiss sounding man selling upmarket kitchen sets. He said he was on his way to Europe and had to sell after a trade fair. The plates on his car were Swiss.

My neighbour is an ex lawyer – that shows how convincing these guys can be. He was so convinced he spent £1,270 – only to find out they were fake.

I think the brand is called Swiss Jura .

There’s a warning up on streetlife.com about this man as apparently he has been operating in this area of Surrey for a while.

The Police do know about this man

Surrey Police are warning people to not fall into the same trap, after two women were duped out of hundreds of pounds.

The man reportedly told the two women different stories about who he was and why he had the knives.

The first sale took place in a golf club car park in Weybridge.

He told the woman he was from Switzerland and his father ran a Swiss Cuisine company. He persuaded the woman to buy two sets of what she thought was St Moritz knives for €450.

As usual, if it looks too good to be true – it probably is.

May 4, 2016

UK Payments Fraud in 2015

Fraud is a huge industry with countless victims and it’s getting worse.

Financial fraud losses across payment cards, remote banking and cheques totalled £755 million in 2015, an increase of 26 per cent compared to 2014.

Prevented fraud totalled £1.76 billion in 2015. This is incidents that were detected and prevented by the banks and card companies and is equivalent to £7 in every £10 of attempted fraud being stopped.

Card Fraud can be split up as follows:-

70% is remote purchases – i.e. where stolen card details are used

13% is lost and stolen –

2% is card not received i.e. the card is stolen in transit

8% is counterfeit cards

7% is card ID theft – the fraudster uses the person’s identity information to get their card details

All of these frauds are rising except for counterfeit cards which is probably dropping as a result of chip and pin technology.

We all need to be more aware then ever of these scams and how to avoid them.

Further information available at http://www.financialfraudaction.org.uk/cms/assets/1/2015%20year%20end%20fraud%20update%20report.pdf