Centenarian lost £60,000 after being targeted in catalogue scams

A 103-YEAR-OLD man was conned out of £60,000 after being bombarded with bogus catalogue offers for more than a decade.

Leslie Jubb, a widower and dementia sufferer from Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire, is thought to be Britain’s oldest scam victim. He ended up on a so-called “suckers’ list” that enabled fraudsters from around the world to send him mail promising entry into prize draws and large cash prizes on the condition that he ordered goods from their catalogues.

The scale of his losses came to light only when he went into a care home last September while his family renovated his home.

Hertfordshire County Council, which reported the case, said his house was “full of incredibly overpriced products” such as tablets to help with arthritis, blood pressure and the digestive system.

Mr Jubb’s family said he was lured into the purchases by the promise of plasma televisions and cash prizes.

In such scams, pensioners are typically told they are “a guaranteed winner”. But to claim the prize, the victim first must buy a product. In the small print, it is usually admitted that the only “guaranteed” element is a moneyoff voucher worth £1.50 off the next order. The victim is told the draw for the televisions, holidays or cheques will take place at a later date. An example provided by Trading Standards was a marble cake worth “at the most £2” sold for £18.95 including postage, packing, insurances, priority processing and “the initial extortionate price”.

Mr Jubb’s daughter Nova Jordan, 72, said her father was always careful with money but his flat was littered with catalogues and unopened bottles of pills, bags of sweets, packets of biscuits, tins of sausages, toys from foreign countries and other purchases. Some of the pills in the magazines were being sold for as much as £40.

“He used to go down to the local post office to collect parcels and wait for the postman,” Mrs Jordan said. “I think it was the excitement. He was lonely after my mother passed away and it gave him something to do. I think that’s why these scammers target people who are lonely, retired or elderly.”

Trading Standards estimates that £3.2 billion a year is sent off to scams by victims. It recently distributed a “suckers’ list”, seized by the police, to all local authorities.

Hertfordshire County Council said it had used the list to locate and visit more than 1,000 vulnerable people across the county to offer them advice.

A spokesman for the council said: “Mr Jubb was on our list as someone to visit as a potential responder to scam mailings. We visited and found that he had been responding for some years and had lost a lot of money.”