By Callum Erskine
27/01/14
An elderly woman was left ‘devastated’ when she discovered she had been conned for £2000 on Monday in a new scam.
Ute Vaughan, 79, had withdrawn cash at a Hythe cashpoint before she was contacted by people she thought were the police, they however turned out to be frauds. Mrs Vaughan was told by the con-man that her card had been used in Hammersmith, London minutes after her Hythe withdrawal and that to claim that money back she would have to ring the number provided on her bank card.
The phone call to Lloyds Bank confirmed that there had been suspicious activity and Mrs Vaughan had supposedly been paid the money back by the fraud department. The con-man, posing as Detective Inspector Hardy of the Hammersmith police force then contacted Mrs Vaughan again, this time in order to have her help with a case at the Hythe branch of Lloyds Bank relating to counterfeit money being distributed. “I now trusted him; he even made me ring 999 to verify that he was real. I don’t know how he did that because I did and they said that it was all fine.”
Mrs Vaughan was told to withdraw £2000 from the Hythe branch of Lloyds bank and give it to an undercover police officer posing as a courier. Mrs Vaughan stated that the man “came bursting into my house when I opened the door to him and his attitude was quite aggressive.” Mrs Vaughan described the man as “large, he looked like a bouncer.”
Keith Ferguson an officer with the fraud squad handling Mrs Vaughan’s case says “It really makes me angry when fraudsters take advantage of helpless old people who have a hard enough time as it is. We will be doing everything we can in order to catch the people doing this because this is now the second time this has happened in the Shepway area in the last couple of weeks.”
An unnamed gentleman had encountered a similar misfortune two weeks before Mrs Vaughan, however the money taken from him equated to £45,000.
On the 12th of October 2013 BBC news posted on their website that in Sussex a similar scam had occurred, on two separate occasions in Eastbourne and Rye. For more information see the BBC news website.