The TV licence scam that just won’t go away

AYOU are right – this is a scam, and one that continues to be shut down by internet service providers only for it to appear again under a new guise.

We looked at one link – no longer available – which went to a truck bodywork repair garage in Indiana.

Another appears to go to a sports website. Needless to say, neither organisation has anything to do with this racket as many sites are routinely hi-jacked.

You can tell your email is a scam – and not just because TV Licensing does not communicate in this way. Look at the email senders – they are in Japan or Russia or Venezuela and other places.

Some emails look better than others – they steal wording and numbers and other details from the genuine site, but as we have said before, you only need one in 10,000 to reply with a credit card number that can be raided to make this a paying proposition.

In March, Which? stated £830,000 had been lost to this, probably more as this number is calculated on reports to Action Fraud – many victims keep silent about falling for this racket.

You need one TV licence per household. Any person at the property can buy it – licences are currently free for over 75s – otherwise £154.50, with an easy payment plan provided by TV Licensing which works out at £15 a year more expensive.

The licence is a legal requirement to watch “live TV” on any device – it does not have to be a television set. It is also needed to watch “catch-up” on BBC iplayer but you don’t need one if all you ever watch is a service like Netflix or Amazon Prime.

I KEEP getting emails about my television licence. They usually say something like my licence has expired or is about to expire and that I can sort all this out by clicking on a panel in the email. They seem to address me by my email name – and don’t know where I live. I do have a TV licence although it is not in my own name – my partner bought one years ago and renews it every 12 months via direct debit. I suspect this is a scam, but this has been going on for months with lots of variations on this theme. What does Which? know about this?