Henley Probus Club

MEMBERS of Henley Men’s Probus were treated at our September meeting to a very interesting though slightly scary talk on financial crimes and scams by our guest speaker, Ian Clarke. 

Ian, who has 42 years’ experience in the financial industry, opened with details of some historic scams to include one by Herbert Michael Revenue, H M Revenue, the sale of the Roman Empire and the famous Ponzi scheme, which took place in the Twenties.

He highlighted the ability and skill of the scammers through history and the naivety of some of those who get scammed by these very clever con artists. Ian then went on to discuss some to the present-day scams which include fraudulent websites and schemes involving diamonds, cryptocurrency, forestry, land for development and wine along with pension scheme fraud.

He explained that there is almost always some element of truth in these scams but that they depend on clever marketing to make them seem real and too good to be true.

Ian cautioned that the most worrying are AI (artificial intelligence) frauds which are getting increasingly convincing with the use of voice and facial recognition software.

He explained about nearly identical websites which get you to pay for something that is actually free. The example he used was the renewal of passports, which can be done for free on the government website but that is being charged for using websites that are nearly identical to the real thing.

Ian encouraged us all to use a safe word or phrase among family members so that scammers claiming to be a spouse, son, daughter or grandchild can be more easily identified if they try to make contact using messaging apps or emails.

As Ian came to the end of his talk he reiterated that we should be extremely cautious of ever letting anyone have remote access to our computers. As a precaution, he encouraged us to mistrust everything.

Roger Roberts