The Office of Fair Trading has once again declared February 'Scam Awareness Month'. Although the budget for the campaign has been reduced it will once again run for a full month.

After last year's modest campaign there was some doubt as to how much of a priority scams still are for the Office of Fair Trading and Trading Standards. The Scam Awareness Month was reduced to a forthnight and the campaign was aimed at assessing the scale of the problem rather than stopping scams. Although getting scammers convicted is still not the main aim of this the Scamnesty campaign, the OFT has relaunched it with vigour. The campaign will run for the whole month of February, there are more Scamnesty bins than ever, and a new Scamnesty website has been launched to educate the public about scams. The budget for the campaign has been increased from £260,000 to £400,000.

The OFT has started the campaign by releasing new figures showing that scams are still a major problem in the UK. A YouGov poll estimates that just over one in ten people in the UK have responded to a scam at some point in their life, and that one in 25 people have responded to a scam in the last twelve months. E-mail is the most common scam approach (73 per cent), well ahead of scams via letter (21 per cent) and text message (12 per cent).

In a press release published today, the Chief Executive of the OFT notes that scammers are "using ever more sophisticated and cunning tactics to dupe people out to their cash." The Scamnesty campaign should help people "recognise the warning signs" and encourage victims to "feel confident enough to seek advice from friends and family, or from Consumer Direct."

The main tips for avoiding scams have remained the same:

• Stop, think and be sceptical. If something sounds too good to be true it probably is.
• Do not be rushed into sending off money to someone you do not know, however plausible they might sound and even where an approach is personalised.
• Ask yourself how likely it is that you have been especially chosen for this offer - thousands of other people will probably have received the same offer.
• Think about how much money you could lose from replying to a potential scam - it's not a gamble worth taking.
• If you are unsure of an offer, speak to family or friends and seek advice from Consumer Direct before sending any money or giving out any banking or credit card details.

Links

• Scamnesty (consumerdirect.gov) [The Consumer Direct website was axed in 2011].
• OFT launches 'Scamnesty' (oft.gov.uk)