The unfortunate thing is that it is not a crime to be gullible or trusting. There are many, usually older citizens but not always, who are trusting and can’t understand why anyone would be anything but.
NS&I phoned me a few years ago when I still had an account with them and started asking for my security information, so I hung up on them. I phoned them myself later on and was told this call was genuine...
How many men are there in the country with children?
The screech from those isn't very loud or continuous, though?
About 30 years ago the company that I worked for would send out prices by fax overnight. There was a wrong number in the recipient list and some poor devil was regularly woken at 3AM. The BT nuisance calls team had rather a sense of humour failure over the issue.
Certainly as loud as the network would allow (primarily to keep the signal to noise ratio (for reception) manageable). Stories of 'midnight calls' were legion and the recipient couldn't stop them - other than going off hook. In my case I had to hook up a fax switch to receive it to see who was sending sales figures to me.
A colleague had the same not so long ago, his daughter is forever loosing her phone. He says he was quite taken in until they asked for £1400 and he then knew she'd never ask for money that way but he said he was rather convinced for awhile...
I had that one in my Spam Text folder a while ago. Also yesterday had an email from FB saying someone's tried to log into my account, I went into my FB settings and couldn't see anything untoward.
A while back, after booking with Bookings.com, I was messaged directly from the "hotel" asking me to resubmit my payment details to "confirm" my payment. The original payment (which had already gone through successfully) was paid in pounds and the request was for the equivalent amount but quoted in Euros. I contacted the hotel and they told me that this was a regular issue and Bookings.com were investigating.
By "regular", did the hotel mean a frequently occurring attempted scam? Presume the hotel's account with booking.com, or the platform itself, must have been compromised? Or are the scammers just guessing that you've recently made a booking?
I have heard that hotels are tricked into downloading malware that opens their bookings.com portal to the fraudsters. This means that the emails come from the hotel's real account.
At least it was internal rather than being sent to someone external and incorrect.
Even if they are genuine, giving money to charities operating in the area is better than giving it to one individual.
It's more likely to be genuine because that was your bank (they could have made a wild guess I suppose). What isn't genuine of course is the ones that start "This is bank security"...
If you were registered with any job agencies in the past, chances are that they still have your details on a database. Many agencies will run search algorithms of those databases and automatically send out emails to anyone vaguely matching a clients requirements. I get them now and again, like you I am retired so I just ignore them.
I had a phone call about a job recently, and I have never been registered with an agency, nor am I on LinkedIn.
