Swindled out of life savings

This is an awful case of crooks impersonating a High Street bank. A chap I’ll just call Peter, who’s in his 70s, tells me: “I was waiting for confirmation of an operation from the hospital, so I was picking up phone calls from withheld numbers, which I don’t normally do. “We were very vulnerable at the time.” The call appeared to be from NatWest and Peter was told that his online banking details had been hacked.

Peter and his wife were advised to transfer all their savings to their current accounts “for safety”.

The next stage was to tell them to create new accounts at Barclays and to transfer the money – £50,000 – into them. From there, the money vanished. “The result is the bulk of our life savings have been lost, which has had a devastating affect on us,” said Peter.

They’ve reported the matter to Action Fraud.