Another offered a shopping list of “scam pages and live panels” for TSB at £200 a shot, Barclays at £200, Lloyd’s at £175, HSBC at £150 and Halifax for £125. Other sites touted included Ebay, Apple Pay, PayPal, EE, Netflix, DVLA, HMRC and Royal Mail.
UK Finance data showed the scale of fraud with some £479 million lost in 2020 to scams where people were tricked into making bank transfers to fraudsters – also known as authorised push payment (APP) fraud. This was five per cent up on the previous year.
Investment scams were the fastest-rising type of APP scam, totalling £135.1 million. People can lose particularly large sums to investment scams, and may be tempted due to the low returns available generally during the coronavirus crisis.
Purchase scams, in which the victim pays in advance for goods or services that are never received, remained the most common form of APP fraud, accounting for more than half (52 per cent) of cases.