Vigilance must be watchword for all of us to beat thieves
Rural crime affecting farms used to be small-scale. Now it’s big, sometimes frightening, business. Instead of a missing bag of potatoes, a few turnips or a few hand tools, it’s quad bikes, tractors, livestock trailers and four-wheel drives worth tens of thousands of pounds or a flock of sheep that are there at night and gone in the morning.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that, even if thieves are spotted, a farmer or farm staff can be in a quandary. How sensible is it to confront an organised gang by trying to block an exit or tackle them physically? What about repercussions, such as their return at some future date simply to cause damage or set fire to a shed?
There have even been reports of unorthodox plea-bargaining. One thief who had been caught and charged contacted the farmer before his trial date with an offer: drop the charges and you’ll never have anything stolen or damaged again.
The danger, and horror, of resorting to threatening thieves with a gun have been well documented in the case of Tony Martin, who shot and killed a man who broke into his farmhouse. Similarly, lifethreatening injuries have been recorded as a farmer tried to stop the theft of diesel from a storage tank.
As in have-a-go attempts during high street robberies, a fine line exists between deciding whether such an attempt to stop a robbery is worth potential death or injury. Clue: it isn’t.
But, increasingly, crime does not have to be physical. Like the rest of the population, farmers are vulnerable to telephone
scams. Criminals obviously work on the basis that a businessman has a bank account worth robbing and put a lot of effort in to attempted deceptions that go way beyond the “Sir, you have a problem with your computer,” – “No, I haven’t, be off with you” nuisance calls that most of us are familiar with.
A scam reported from Orkney this year is an example of what can happen. Kenny Slater, group secretary for the island’s NFU, said one of his members had lost a five-figure sum after a telephone call that seemed to come from his bank.
“The most worrying aspect was that the scammer had manipulated the caller ID displayed on the farmer’s phone to look as if the call was from his bank,” he said. “The scammer said he needed confirmation from our member that a large payment being made electronically to HMRC was genuine.
“It obviously wasn’t genuine and the fraudster then offered to help stop the payment going through.”
To do that, the scammer asked for confidential details relating to the account, which the farmer provided, allowing removal of a large sum from it.
It was brave of the farmer to try to warn others by admitting to being fooled, but in spite of his warning and other cases reported
in the media, such scams continue. As NFU Scotland noted about the Orkney case, it happened at a particularly busy time of year for many farmers, with lambing, calving and spring crop work going on.
With stress levels already high and adrenalin pumping on a busy day, it’s easy to see how a phone call identified as coming from your bank could be dealt with quickly and the potential dangers not spotted.
The advice, as always, is that your bank will never phone or email to ask for confidential information. Nor will it ask for payment over the phone.
It is also tempting to think it will never happen to you. So tempting that a celebrity writer – all right, Jeremy Clarkson – wrote an article in his usual scathing style dismissing anyone who lost money from their bank account to scammers or hackers as, I paraphrase, mental defectives.
He had the decency to admit a few days later that a hacker had proved him wrong by siphoning several hundred pounds from his account as a lesson.
No one is safe. As noted before, fewer people on farms with much more expensive machines and tools than used to be the case makes it easier for criminals. And phone scams become ever more sophisticated. It’s a sad truth that none of us can relax.