Fraud Prevention for Older People: The Six Approaches and Their Tells

Fraud is not clever. It is repetitive, and almost all of it against older people arrives in one of six forms, each of which has a single reliable tell that does not require any technical knowledge to apply. This page is the tells, what to do in the moment, and how to get money back.

The one rule that covers most of it

No legitimate organisation will ever ask you to move money to keep it safe, hand over a card or a PIN to a courier, or read out a code sent to your phone. Not a bank, not the police, not a utility, not a government department.

That single sentence stops the majority of high-value frauds, because the majority of them require one of those three things. If any of them is being asked for, the answer is no, regardless of how convincing the caller is or what number appears on your display.

Caller display can be faked. A call that shows your bank's real number can still be a fraudster, which is why the correct response to any unexpected call about money is to hang up and dial back using the number on the back of your card.

The six approaches

What to do in the first hour if money has gone

Call your bank immediately and say the words "I think I have been scammed", banks have dedicated fraud teams and speed genuinely matters, because a payment that has not yet settled can sometimes be stopped.

Then report it to Action Fraud, the national reporting centre, either by phone or online. You will get a reference number, which the bank may ask for and which matters if the case progresses.

Write down everything while it is fresh: times, numbers, names used, what was said, what was sent. That record is what a complaint or a reimbursement claim rests on, and memory degrades fast under stress.

Getting the money back is more likely than people think

For bank transfers made to a fraudster, UK rules now require payment firms to reimburse victims of authorised push payment fraud in most circumstances, with the cost shared between the sending and receiving banks. This changed the position substantially and many people do not know it.

If the bank declines, that is not the end. Take the complaint through the bank's formal process, and if it is not resolved within eight weeks, or you receive a deadlock letter sooner, take it to the Financial Ombudsman Service. It is free, it is independent, and its decision binds the firm.

For card payments there is a separate route: chargeback, and for credit purchases over a certain amount, section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act makes the card provider jointly liable. These are different mechanisms with different deadlines, so ask which applies.

Practical protections worth setting up

Register free with the Telephone Preference Service, which removes you from legitimate cold-calling lists and makes the remaining calls easier to identify as suspect. Ask the phone provider about call blocking and anonymous call rejection, both are commonly available and often free.

Set a low daily transfer limit in online banking. Most fraud requires moving a large sum quickly, and a limit converts a catastrophe into a phone call. Raising it temporarily when you genuinely need to is easy.

Consider a trusted contact arrangement with the bank, where a named person can be alerted to unusual activity without having access to the account. Several banks offer this and it is underused.

How to have the conversation with a parent

Not as a warning about their judgement. The most effective framing is that these approaches fool professionals and are designed by organised criminals to be convincing, which is true and removes the implication that being targeted reflects on them.

Agree a rule rather than debating individual cases. "We never make a financial decision on the same day someone asks us to" is a rule that works, because urgency is the one feature every one of these frauds shares.

And make it reciprocal. A rule both of you follow, where either can ring the other before acting, is far easier to accept than a rule imposed in one direction.

The part nobody says out loud

Shame is the reason fraud goes unreported, and unreported fraud is what allows the same approach to keep working. The people who fall for these are not credulous; they are people who were called at a bad moment by someone whose entire job is this.

If it has happened to someone in your family, the single most useful thing you can say is that it was not their fault and that reporting it helps somebody else. That is not a comforting fiction. It is how the reporting data that shapes bank controls gets built.

See household costs worth reviewing and what insurance does and does not cover.

Frequently asked questions