ASA lends support to OFT scam awareness drive

25 January 2006

The ASA is lending its support to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) Scams Awareness Campaign to help raise public awareness of the problems with scams. Launching next month the campaign involves a four week long initiative to help educate people how to recognise the general characteristics of scams and how to avoid falling victim to them.

The OFT, in partnership with national and international consumer protection bodies, such as the ASA, will use February to highlight the key messages of their ongoing awareness campaign. Though individual types of scams, particularly those that are mass marketed and affect a large number of people, will form the focus of the campaign with a new example highlighted each week; another objective is to demystify the concept that only certain types of people fall for scams. You do not have to be gullible or vulnerable to become a victim, there is a scam for everyone. Scams can often be sophisticated and those who least expect to fall for them can find themselves parted from their money. The campaign will outline how people fall for scams, which scams/techniques work, as well as describing the profiles of the kinds of people who most readily fall for them.

The ASA will be providing information on its website during February to highlight some of the advertising scams in circulation that are detrimental to consumers. In particular, the ASA will focus on psychic mailings which will be a central topic on the OFT’s agenda during the campaign. The ASA receives many complaints about unsolicited mailings which arrive through people’s doors promising, amongst other things, to help recipients find fortune and love or to cure various ailments, lift curses and bad luck. These dubious promises can leave vulnerable consumers out of pocket and disappointed, having paid for something that never materialises. The ASA will underline the problems surrounding these types of scam and how best to deal with the offending material.

Whilst the campaign will help consumers to recognise scams, it will also encourage them to adopt a more pro-active role in stamping out fraudulent practices. Ultimately the message, “Recognise it, report it, stop it” will urge consumers to act and report scams, not only for themselves but also on behalf of others who have fallen for them. Consumers, by adopting a sceptical view of any invitation to part with their money, can avoid lining the pockets of unscrupulous businesses.

The ASA supports the continuing drive to raise consumer awareness about scams, to combat the concept that people who fall victim to false promises are in some way greedy or gullible and to firmly shift the emphasis of blame where it should be – onto those who are behind the scams.