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Money Box

Life-changing Scams and Child Benefit

Money Box

BBC

Business

4.2825 Ratings

🗓️ 20 December 2025

⏱️ 25 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Money Box takes a special look at how victims of fraud are treated by those supposed to help them in the weeks and months afterwards. How are they helped in their fight for justice by the police, their banks and the courts? Or are they all too often left struggling to deal with both the financial and mental impact on their own? We also hear how a small regional charity in the UK has partnered with police to be there for victims when the spotlight of the original crime has faded.

Parents who lost their child benefit because HMRC wrongly believed they had left the country deserved better treatment according to a senior MP. Dame Meg Hillier, the chair of the Treasury Select Committee, made the comments after the tax office stripped payments from almost 24,000 families after it used travel data to conclude they had left the UK permanently. As we previously reported, some of those people had simply been on holiday. HMRC says it took swift action and that, where there was evidence that customers had continued UK employment, it reinstated payments automatically without any need for customer contact and those payments have been backdated.

As the Budget draws nearer how do frozen tax thresholds already impact people and how might that change on Wednesday?

Plus, if you've got significant savings in a UK bank or building society or credit union, the level of protection you’d have if one of them goes bust is to rise from £85k to £120k – how will that work?

Presenter: Felicity Hannah Reporters: Dan Whitworth and Jo Krasner Researcher: Eimear Devlin Editor: Jess Quayle Senior News Editor: Sara Wadeson

(First broadcast 12pm Saturday 22nd November 2025)

Transcript

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0:00.0

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts.

0:07.0

My Christmas Mix is pure 90s festive nostalgia.

0:11.1

You know, the Christmas songs you listen to on repeat.

0:14.0

Ho!

0:14.3

Ho! Ho! No, no, no.

0:17.5

I'm all about the big hitting Christmas anthems.

0:20.4

Come on, guys. What about those tunes that really slay? It's Christmas kitchen disco season, surely.

0:26.4

Give me hip-hip Christmas bangers every day. Those Christmas tracks that are straight out of lapland.

0:30.9

Get all kinds of Christmassy. Just search Christmas music on BBC Sounds.

0:35.7

Hello, in today's Moneybox podcast, we hear from a senior MP who says parents who lost their

0:41.2

child benefit because the tax office incorrectly believed they'd moved abroad deserved better

0:46.7

treatment. With just days to go to the budget, how more people are paying more income tax,

0:52.2

workers and pensioners, and what might change on Wednesday.

0:55.7

Plus savers get extra protection on their cash. But first, victims of fraud are being failed

1:01.6

by the criminal justice system. That's according to the charity victim support. Here at Moneybox,

1:06.7

we often hear about the devastating impact of fraud and scams, which are the most common crime in the UK.

1:13.0

And as one victim told us, it can change you forever.

1:16.2

I don't think you ever get over it, really.

1:19.2

I think it stays with you and it makes you suspicious.

1:23.3

And you wonder, anybody that you don't know, are they who they say they are?

1:29.3

It's really dreadful.

1:31.1

More from Joan and those concerns from victim support in just a moment.

...

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