From the blog: We live in an age in which the internet finds something to promote or celebrate every day, week or month, from cupcakes to allotments. Believe it or not, there is even a world egg day.
There are also specific periods of time set aside for more salient subjects, such as National Stress Awareness Day and Pensions Awareness Day, the latter taking place in September.
July, however, just so happens to be Scams Awareness Month, and is designed to help people spot scams and report suspicious activity.
There are also specific periods of time set aside for more salient subjects, such as National Stress Awareness Day and Pensions Awareness Day, the latter taking place in September.
July, however, just so happens to be Scams Awareness Month, and is designed to help people spot scams and report suspicious activity.
In a report released in March last year, Citizens Advice found that 10.9m consumers had received unsolicited contact about their pension since the introduction of pension freedoms in April 2015. Worryingly, pension scams are most often initiated by cold calls, with unsolicited phone calls making up 68 per cent of pension scams contact methods at the beginning of 2016.
It is a shame then, that a ban on cold-calling, which was announced in chancellor Philip Hammond’s 2016 Autumn Statement, was omitted from the Financial Guidance and Claims Bill.
Source: Citizens Advice
The exclusion was met with displeasure. “We do not allow cold-calling for mortgages; we should not allow cold-calling for pensions,” said Liberal Democrat Lord Sharkley.
But Baroness Buscombe, parliamentary undersecretary of state representing the Department for Work and Pensions, said that the government plans to publish its response to the consultation “shortly”. She insisted that a cold-calling ban was left out of the bill because “it’s a complex area” with “questions of how to define existing relationships and how to deal with referrals and third parties”.
TPR takes action
While the government may have been accused for being somewhat languid in its approach to pensions cold-calling, the Pensions Regulator is taking action by participating with other organisations as part of Scams Awareness Month.
Staff at the regulator are attending events across the UK this July to speak to financial advisers about how they can protect clients from succumbing to scams, and what to do if they think one of their clients has fallen victim to fraudulent activity.
Engaging directly with advisers could help. As the regulator points out, they are trusted and relied upon by their clients as they assist them in planning for the future. This makes advisers the ideal agents for increasing awareness of scams.
But how many consumers actually pay for advice? Financial Conduct Authority research found that only 6 per cent of UK adults had regulated financial advice related to investments, saving into a pension or retirement planning in the past 12 months.
With such a small proportion of people having exposure to regulated financial advisers, blanket measures designed to help a large number of consumers are likely to be more effective.
That is why the cold-calling ban needs to come into force sooner rather than later. It is not the be-all and end-all. There will still be a plethora of ways for fraudsters to target those saving for their retirement, by calling from overseas where the ban does not apply, or by contacting people via email and text, for example.
But it will be a start, and could raise far more public awareness than communicating the risk of scams through regulated financial advisers, a pricey resource that many consumers do not have access to.
