15 June 2020
The Pension Protection Fund (PPF) has joined forces with six other pension bodies to produce a new guide to explain how your pension is protected and how to avoid scams during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This easy to read guide provides key information and advice from reputable bodies you can trust. View it at www.ppf.co.uk/sites/default/files/2020-05/COVID-19-and-your-pension.pdf.
It covers current issues such as:
Don’t forget that if you are considering transferring your benefits, we ask that you do so very carefully. We strongly recommend that you take regulated advice from an independent financial adviser (which can be found at register.fca.org.uk) and also look at the Pension Wise website for free impartial advice.
Unfortunately scamming continues to be a serious issue for us all, with Google reporting they are blocking over 100 million emails each day. In order to encourage people to open the emails, subjects often contain words and phrases such as ‘COVID-19’, ‘URGENT’, ‘VACCINE’ or ‘ALERT’.
We have put together a list of websites you can visit which you may find useful in relation to detecting and pre-empting scamming attempts:
As of 5 June, Action Fraud have reported that victims of coronavirus-related scams have lost over £5 million. They have received over 11,700 reports of COVID-19 related phishing emails. The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) are continuing to highlight a trend of emails and texts sent by fraudsters purporting to be from DWP.
As the Government’s Track and Trace programme commences, this is a new potential guise for scammers so guidance is being provided to help people, stressing that Track and Trace will not ask for payments, PINs, or require anything to be downloaded – they are also advising to take care only to use the appropriate web address contact-tracing.phe.gov.uk.