How is Money Mail Doing?

The Daily Mail and Sunday Mail have a section called “Money Mail” and they do a good job fighting for consumers, revealing incompetence, highlighting injustice and trying to get money back for people who have been conned.

Their review of 2021 shows that they won back something like £1.1 million for their readers.

This included:

  • Scottish Power continuing to take monthly debits from a man forced out of his house due to a fire. They eventually returned £3,600
  • British Gas failing to take a meter reading for 2 years despite being told the smart meter didn’t work
  • Forcing Barclays to refund a £49,5000 mortgage deposit stolen by scammers
  • Covid fraud
  • Travel insurance failures
  • Power companies ignoring their customers

And much more.

If you’re struggling with a bureaucratic organisation and even the industry regulator isn’t much help then maybe the publicity of Money Mail on the case can help.

If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email.

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Type I Diabetes Cure Scam

There are lots of scammer’s messages advertising cures for diabetes.  But they normally quote type II diabetes which is due to lifestyle factors including weight, diet, levels of exercise etc.

HEALTH ALERT

Rid yourself of Diabetes forever

Type II diabetes can be helped by lifestyle changes plus an improved diet and more exercise.

But type I diabetes is an autoimmune disease where the body cannot produce enough insulin and is normally diagnosed in early childhood.

Changes to lifestyle, diet and exercise cannot cure type I diabetes, only mitigate the effects and it’s a lifelong illness.

But some scammers are so stupid they claim to have the magical cure for type I diabetes.

“Type I and II diabetes can be cured with this simple food within 7 days”

This is just dumb and hopefully anyone with type I diabetes knows enough about the disease to realise this is just a pathetic scam.

Never trust unsolicited emails.

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G’s Problems with Scam Callers

G. received a phone call from someone claiming to be from BT.

The caller told him there is a very important and urgent problem with your Internet router and we need to replace it.

“We will send a new one out to you immediately.”

G. wasn’t impressed and said that he wasn’t interested and goodbye.

The caller tried again – being more insistent this time.

“Your Wi-Fi is sending out dangerous signals and needs to be fixed”

G. is a courteous person and didn’t want to offend but again said he wasn’t interested. “Goodbye”. He hoped the caller would leave him alone.

But next day the caller was back again. This time claiming there were problems with the Internet line and replacement kit was on the way.

G. still didn’t want to be rude to the caller so politely asked him to stop calling, said ‘Goodbye’ And hoped that would be the end of it.

But the caller continued to call 2 or 3 times per day.

G. realised something had to be done so he set-up Sky Talk Shield on his phone.

This service stops anyone calling his number directly.

When you phone his number you get a recorded message from Sky telling you the number you’ve called  has Sky Talk Safe and to say your name and press 2 on the keypad.

When you’ve done that, the service calls G. and plays back the name of the caller. He then chooses to accept or refuse the call.

This service does have a cost but it does seem an effective way of blocking all unwanted callers and solved G.s problem with the fake BT caller.

A quicker way of dealing with this type of persistent scammer is to tell them exactly what you think of them, using direct language – have a good shout, it does you good.

If you haven’t worked out how G. knew from the start that it was a scam call – he didn’t have a BT line, only Sky.

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Ryanair Travel Agent Booking

Ryanair has complained to the regulators that too many people are booking Ryanair flights via travel agents and that’s causing problems for Ryanair including that some passengers are being overcharged.

This is perfectly legal of course – you can book a Ryanair flight via a physical or online travel agent. Ryanair estimate this to be 10% to 15% of their business – about 25 million flights per year.

They may charge you a premium over the Ryanair direct booking cost – but they do need to make money for their time spent, so is not unreasonable.

Most of concern is that they if they book the flight using their corporate credit card and then the flight is cancelled then Ryanair don’t have the correct details to process a refund and the agent may not pass on the full refund or refund  their own charges.

This is legal, so consider whether to buy a Ryanair flight directly through the Ryanair website or to use a travel agent which may be more convenient but more costly.

If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email.

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