Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Friends can stop such cruelty
This is an anecdote that will haunt me for a long time. An elderly victim of cowboy builders paid £10,000 and all he got was a badly repaired window sill. The poor man left his house and was too terrified to return in case the crooks demanded even more money. Concerned staff found him hiding in a public library in Staines, Surrey. I heard the tale from trading standards officer Linda Crowley at a great initiative to encourage us all to help fight fraud like this. Called Friends Against Scams, it’s a short online course that details the impact of common scams and ways to spot a possible victim. The statistics are shocking – the fraud toll in the UK is between £5billion and £10billion, with scammers having targeted 53% of people over 65. Trading Standards also offer face-to-face seminars, which was where I met Linda. Her Staines tale left me wishing that a neighbour had spotted the warning signs of cowboy builders at work and raised the alarm. “As a nation we do not like to interfere but sometimes we need to, otherwise the criminals win,” said Linda. Which brings me to my Cowboy of the Week: 55-year-old Stuart Ackerley of Netherne, Surrey. Over 18 months he extracted £122,000 from his victim for abysmal unnecessary repair work that will cost £45,000 to put right. When the victim complained, Ackerley, 55, warned he’d be “taken to the woods”. The cowardly worm has been jailed for four years for fraud following a prosecution by Croydon trading standards.