Alex Easton MLA has today warned people to be careful and not to be fooled by money scams over the Christmas period.
Speaking today Alex Easton MLA said:
“ I recently received an email scam from an individual from Africa who wanted to give me $10.5 million US dollars, all I had to do was provide my name, age, address, email account and phone number. Obviously I was not fooled by this as I regularly receive such emails, and the individual was immediately removed from my email account.”
“What this highlights is the need for people to be careful when using the Internet or Facebook especially at this time of year. There are some people out there who will try and take advantage of young vulnerable adults and indeed our elderly population. For instance I have been in contact with the Post Office and there are currently two scams happening at the moment, one being pensioners sending postal orders to enter competition’s which don’t exist, and another one is sending money grams being sent to a soldier they have met on a dating website, who turns out is not a solider. We also see as Christmas is approaching that parcels, cards are being left or emails sent to rearrange parcel deliveries.”
“It is shocking to think that some people can be taken in by these scams, and I would urge people to think carefully about what they are doing. If you don’t know the person and it sounds too good to be true then my advice is to ignore it and delete as it is most likely a scam after your money. I would like to see if the PSNI would look at doing some sort of advertisement campaign over the Christmas period so that these scams fall flat on their faces. My advice to people is if you think there is a scam then report it to the PSNI and don’t hand your money over.”
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