Pension Alert: Keep Your Money Safe!

Fraudsters are targeting people in their forties, fifties and sixties to cheat victims out of thousands – and getting duped could be easier than you think.

- Francis Quinn

When Joan Davy*, 56, answered the phone to a young woman offering her a free pension review, she was immediately suspicious. ‘I’d read about pension scams,’ says Joan, ‘And I’m not stupid – I usually put the phone down on cold callers. But she was very polite, not pushy at all, and when she reassured me she was from a company that I’d heard of, and suggested I ring to check her credentials, my guard dropped.’ Joan answered the woman’s questions about her pension pot, and was told that if she took the money out of her current pension, she could invest in a scheme offering a guaranteed 15% a year for life. A glossy brochure followed in the post. ‘I read it thoroughly, and it all looked completely legitimate. I’d been worried about how I was going to live on my pension, and it seemed like the answer.’

Only when the woman called again did alarm bells ring. ‘She said they’d had an incredible response to the offer, and were going to close it that day, but she could send round the application forms by courier. I realised then it was a scam, but I couldn’t believe how near I’d come to falling for it. I know people will think I must be stupid, but it really was convincing – if they’d just played it out for longer, I could easily have lost my life savings.’

Joan’s experience is far from unusual. Although they’ve always been around, pension scams have drastically increased since 2015, when changes in the law made it easier to take cash out of pension schemes, creating a pool of potential victims with access to large sums of money. Research by the Money Advice Service found that pension fraudsters are making as many as eight calls a second, as well as approaches by text and email. And they work: thousands of people have lost their life savings to these scams.