Several residents in Rye have been pestered by calls purporting to be from the police or HMRC suggesting than an investigation is in progress and advising the receiver of the call to press 1 to contact their case officer. The call has been repeated to the same people over several days.
This has caused distress to one elderly lady, who reports having responded by pressing 1 and getting dead silence at the other end.
This is likely to be like a phishing scam, either designed to obtain personal information or to obtain high premium phone line revenue. If any of our readers experience this, we advise not responding at all but terminating the call and immediately dialling 1471 to ascertain the sender’s number. This should then be reported to the dedicated police reporting email address.
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This is not a phishing scam. It is a scam designed to obtain money from the recipient of the call who will be threatened with an arrest warrant because they supposedly owe HRMC unpaid tax. The caller will say that the way to pay is to buy iTunes cards and when the cards have been bought the scammer will ask for the codes on the back of the cards to be read out to them. In this way the scammer can sell the codes on.
This type of scam was publicised by BBC Radio Sussex a few weeks ago when one listener fell prey and lost £1,000.