Figures revealed by City of London police showed that in July £1.256m was reported to Action Fraud as being lost by members of the public. The figure was £1.171m for August. The statistics include both crime and information reports made to Action Fraud.
Earlier this year City of London police figures showed losses due to pension scams more than tripled to nearly £5m in the month after the pension reforms took effect. From May to August the total has moved to nearly £8m.
Anti-scam officials said, however, that it would be premature to be drawing definitive conclusions about the level of this crime and the timing of the freedoms coming into effect.
Scottish Friendly’s Calum Bennie said: “People who’ve worked and saved all their adult life are left devastated when they find out their hard-earned pension investments have been stolen. It’s a gut-wrenching situation for people to find themselves in and the government and industry has to act to warn people of the perils. We need to arm savers with the right information so they can be more vigilant to the techniques used by these crooks.
“Most people know that if something sounds too good to be true, then they should steer clear. However, the problem is that many of these pension predators are able to disguise themselves as reputable and credible. Pension freedom has been, rightly, welcomed but we have to do more to ensure that it is not blighted.”
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Action Fraud officials stated: “The monthly loss figures are not representative of the threat of this fraud type. The figures are extremely varied due to the nature of the fraud, whereby victims will have varying amounts of money in their pension pot.
“With regards to the recent pension reforms and the affect that this will have on Pension Liberation fraud, it is at this stage difficult to draw any conclusions; this is because it can sometimes be months or even years after the crime, that the victim realises that they have been defrauded.”
The figures are subject to change as auditing processes will continue in the future, officials noted, adding they were Action Fraud reports only, with Cifas and UK Payment reports excluded.
In August HMRC put out an alert stating that scammers were using “sophisticated liberation models” to trick savers into handing over their pension funds.
The message came hot on the heels of figures released by Citizens Advice which said 40% of its pension staff had dealt with people who were being targeted repeatedly by suspected fraudsters.
HMRC stated in a newsletter: “Pension liberation and pension scams continue to put pension savings at risk. Promoters are using sophisticated liberation models to encourage taxpayers to access their pension savings early or transfer their hard-earned savings into scam pension schemes with little or no return on their investment.”