Sadly, too many of us accidentally fall foul of traffic laws in a minor way and then receive a surprise letter from the authorities stating the date and time of the offence and the fine to be paid.
Scammers love these as they can replicate the idea endlessly.
E.g. two emails arrived at the radio station
“Reminder for PCN Owner”
And “Penalty Charge Notice (PCN) Alert”
These claimed to be from the London Borough of Haringey and Dagenham Council and be penalty charges. One for “failing to stop after an accident” and the other for “parking on school keep-clear signs”
They had different supposed addresses where the offence took place and looked official and contained a different report of the incident.
Then the following day a third such notice arrived to a different email address and titled “Notification for PCN Proprietor” and a new incident “traffic signal offences”
Clearly someone has gone to a lot of trouble to create a system that churns out multiple versions of this scam letter and to make them look authentic.
Normally these sorts of scams use duplicate letters to different addresses and that is a give-away.
It is of course just a scam. One of the emails even has a spoofed government email address.
The link they want us to click goes to thomaswed.com Obviously nothing to do with Haringey and Dagenham council.
If you receive such a message and are not sure if it is real – contact the authority directly and look up the contact details yourself rather than trusting anything in the message.
If you have any experiences with scammers, spammers or time-waster do let me know, by email.
