LONDON NEW MOBILE PHONE DELIVERY SCAM!!

The scam works like this. A phone or, increasingly of late, phones, are mysteriously delivered to the victim’s home. They haven’t placed the order and so are not surprised when they receive a call saying there has been a mistake and the goods will be collected at a given time. However, rather than an innocent courier coming for them, it is the fraudster or a sidekick. Meanwhile the bill is in the victim’s name.

Despite being 79 years old, GC foiled the crooks by calling the company the phone had come from and arranging to have the phone sent back to it. The fraudster, or his representative, was sent packing with nothing to show for his trickery. It is a pity though that the police were not there to apprehend him when he came.

The fact that someone comes to the door makes this scam particularly personal and unpleasant. The resulting upset can border on feelings of paranoia.

One reader, whose signature is illegible, possibly because she was embarrassed, wrote “I could only assume that a rather unpleasant young man that I had a contretemps with (car to car) at the local tip had set it up for spite.” This infers that this reader may have been taking personal information to the skip which could have been retrieved and then used for nefarious purposes. It is of course important to safeguard such information and shred or burn it rather than dump it. Or had she given details following the car incident? These sort of speculations can keep people awake at night.

Perhaps it also needs to be said that sometimes information may be gleaned from death notices in local papers. Keep precise details to a minimum as much as possible.

Apart from letting the telephone company concerned know as well as the local police, see that Action Fraud - the central crime reporting channel on actionfraud.police.uk - is also informed. Action Fraud didn’t have a precise breakdown of the figures immediately to hand about this type of telephone fraud. However it does say that anyone having an unexpected delivery like this should ask for identification from the courier. It adds that people should not sign for things that they have not ordered.

Yahoo UK