August 1st 2024
As online financial crime continues to increase, Get Safe Online has today unveiled new data that shows that Brits are ‘too polite’ – making them vulnerable to scams – and a new awareness campaign to help counter the issue.
The YouGov Omnibus Survey was undertaken with over 2000 individuals taking part. The outcome was clear – in order to protect themselves from scams, according to our interpretation, at least 15% of the UK public need to ‘toughen up’.
Of those surveyed, 93.4% receive calls from unknown numbers – a pattern that is all too familiar and a red flag for an unsolicited scam, despite the introduction of GDPR a number of years ago.
This latest survey shows that 9.9% of us who receive unexpected calls will ‘wait for a convenient pause in conversation to end the call’ despite not being interested, whilst 4.7% will hold a conversation and talk to the caller as they would with anyone else.
Of those who wait for a convenient pause in a conversation to end the call, 22% do this ‘because it’s the polite thing to do’ with 4.7% admitting they ‘didn’t want to cut the caller off mid-sentence’.
With this in mind, Get Safe Online is launching a new campaign to improve the public’s approach to scam callers – encouraging Brits to stop being so polite – and if it’s a caller they’re not expecting, simply say ‘I’m not interested, thank you’ and hang up.
A quirky ‘blue blob’ character has been created for the social media led initiative and uses four classic scenarios that scam callers often impersonate – a scam caller pretending to be from your bank, a computer technician, a mobile phone provider and an investment opportunity. The campaign creative can be accessed here:
https://vimeo.com/990451306/35832634b7
https://vimeo.com/990451212/6f35eab05e
https://vimeo.com/990451053/4a338451e6
https://vimeo.com/990451118/6f381942f8
Tony Neate, CEO at Get Safe Online comments, “As scammers get more and more sophisticated, it is easy to see how frequently we are conned by these crooks. When it comes to phoney calls, it’s really important that no-one feels compelled to engage. Following the research, it is clear that the message to hang up firmly but politely is the right message to be sharing – and the more individuals we can help in this way, the better. So, if you see our campaign on social media please share it!”
According to Ofcom, 44 million people were targeted by scam callers and messages in the summer of 2022.
57.3% of people questioned in this latest survey said that they would be most likely to use ‘I’m not interested, thank you’ to respond to an unexpected call from somebody who is requesting personal information or offering a product or service.
