I was called this week by a man who introduced himself as Ben. He had a south Asian accent and I could hear in the background what sounded like a call centre a long way away. Ben claimed that I had been chosen by my mobile phone operator to be given a 40 per cent discount.
He said I should wait for two texts and he would then tell me what I needed to do to claim my exclusive prize. After a while of listening to his spiel, I asked why he was so obviously trying to scam me, and the line went dead. “Only a fool would have fallen for that,” I thought, in a glow of self-satisfaction.
Being phoned or texted by one of the multitude of global scammers who often prey on the naive or distracted is very common: almost 45m people in the UK have been targeted by them in the past three months, the telecoms regulator Ofcom disclosed this week. American consumers reported losing $3.4bn to fraud in 2020, much through a range of online scams.