Cracking down on cold calls

In general, an announcement that a government plans a “crackdown” is bad news. It’s usually a sign that they’ve run out of useful ideas and think that literally or metaphorically busting a few heads might help get voters back on side. Still, it’s hard to dismiss the case for a ban on cold calls selling financial products, which ministers trotted out last week. One of the few ironclad rules in money is that if anybody calls you (or emails or texts) with an unmissable opportunity, you should give it a miss. There’s already a explicit ban on selling pension products via cold calls, but no responsible firm should still sell any financial products this way even when technically permitted. Now the message that such calls are always scams will be a bit clearer.

The cold-call ban is one of a series of measures that will also include a ban on “SIM farms” (devices that can send thousands of text messages at once) and an attempt to prevent “number spoofing” (under which fraudsters make calls that appear to come from legitimate UK phone numbers). Whether these will make any real difference is another matter. Most groups of scammers are based outside the UK and don’t care whether their actions are technically illegal here or not.

Banks will also be allowed to delay payments for checks when they suspect fraud. This is intended to cut authorised push payment (APP) fraud, where people are tricked into sending money into accounts controlled by criminals in the belief it is going to a person or business that they trust.