Could you fall victim to a parcel scam?

This is Money Podcast

This is Money

Business News, Business, Investing, News

4.1 • 650 Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2021

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As Britain's streets are filled with drivers whizzing deliveries around, there's a new top scam in town.

Parcel and package delivery scams are the most common type of 'smishing' text messages, a report said this week.

Fraudsters are sneaking into people's text messages, pretending to be couriers that missed you while you were out, or need to arrange or rearrange a delivery. Click the link and you could end up being scammed.

This is being enabled by the wave of online deliveries in the pandemic, as online shopping stepped up a number of gears, and the somewhat chaotic way some drivers are delivering those parcels: who doesn't recognise the 'leave it on the doorstep and run away tactic'?

On this week's podcast, Lee Boyce, Georgie Frost and Simon Lambert look at what uou can do to avoid falling victim, what are the risks if you do, and can we do anything about the rise in fraud?

Also on this week's podcast, its squeaky bum time for the triple lock. Wages are officially up 8.8 per cent and the reference month for pension increases is rapidly approaching, so what will Chancellor Rishi Sunak do?

Will a bumper increase for the state pension arrive, or the breaking of a manifesto pledge?

Plus, the blink and you'll miss it mortgages, as top rates hang around for a very limited time - and the chip shortage that means people are struggling to buy new cars and sending the price of used ones soaring.

And finally, is the current account battle back on? As Nationwide bungs people £100 to sign up, the team take a look.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to This Is Money podcast. I'm Georgie Frost and alongside me and editor Simon Lambert today is assistant editor Lee Boyce. And coming up, we talk about the other
0:09.0	pandemic, parcel delivery tech scams, who hasn't received one, but what can you do to protect yourself? Also, it's squeaky bum time for the triple lock, but what will Rishi do after wages
0:21.2	surged 8.8%? We look at why buying a new car in 2021 is harder than snapping up loo roll
0:28.1	in lockdown 1, and it's pushing prices for use models through the roof as well. Talking
0:33.2	of roofs, the blink and you'll miss it mortgages, plus nationwide's bribe to get us to sign up,
0:38.4	is this the start of a new current account battle? Don't be getting to step to date with all the latest
0:42.7	breaking money news, just go to this ismoney.co.uk or download the app at first. In what is probably
0:49.4	no great surprise to anyone, parcel delivery scam techs have topped the poll.
0:56.8	There is a poll for the most prolific smishing scams.
1:00.7	Yes, the fraudsters swooped in to take advantage of the rise in online shopping during the pandemic
1:05.5	to the tune of almost 500 million that they nabbed off us.
1:10.0	But they're still here. And in massive numbers.
1:13.2	So what can you do to protect yourself? Lee, the former scam man, Boyce, remind us smishing.
1:19.4	What is it? How does it work? And what's going on here?
1:22.7	Yeah. So smithing is just a technique that scam is used basically to send out sort of text and emails
1:30.4	portraying to come from a certain organisation or business.
1:33.6	They want you to click through that link.
1:35.2	They want you to enter personal details.
1:38.0	They want to get as much information off you as they can.
1:40.7	Sometimes these links can have dodgy viruses on and that kind of thing. And it's an epidemic,
1:48.0	Georgian, it's been going on for quite a long time now and it seems like progressively so,
1:53.0	it's getting more and more aggressive as the years go on. And I would suggest that pretty much every person,
	...

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