We increasingly hear of cyber crime with fraudsters getting up to all sorts of mischief with our money. It’s all very alarming. To add insult to injury those heartless bad guys have taken advantage of the latest Ofcom rules enabling them to send a text to networks and receive YOUR PAC code! Countless businesses have fallen prey to unauthorised porting of phone numbers. This has enabled access to bank accounts often with nightmarish outcomes for the victims.
As a slight aside, it is also worth noting that all UK-regulated current or savings accounts, cash ISA’s in banks, building societies and credit unions are covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS). The protection limit was raised from £75,000 to £85,000 per person, per financial institution in 2017. It’s NOT per account, it’s per institution, so if most of your funds are with one bank and exceeds this amount in total take note!
If your money is invested outside UK-regulated accounts such as cryptocurrency or EU-owned banks (this does not apply to Santander which is UK-regulated) that opt for a “passport scheme” where you are reliant on protection primarily from their home government.
Prevention is better than cure of course so how can your business minimise the risk of the above?
At Comms Connect we have put policies in place to protect our customers. We don’t simply send out PAC codes to nameless individuals, we know our customers. The account holder calls or texts us and verify the request and then provide the PAC code. Anyone who isn’t an account holder can’t get access to a PAC code through us. We verify first so that we know it’s our customer not a fraudster texting the number. The big networks can’t possibly offer this level of service or consequently protection. You can of course benefit from the advantages of a big network with the peace of mind and great service of Comms Connect, not that we are biased of course!
Photo by Jefferson Santos on Unsplash
