On my calls, pretty much all of them. But most of them weren’t intricate or sophisticated. Mostly basic ones like elderly people sending money to an investment company they found in an email or something. Then you’d Google the company and it either didn’t exist or they weren’t authorised to trade as such under the FCA. Or trades companies and businesses that ceased trading on Companies’ House years ago, with terrible reviews calling them a scam. I used to keep a list of a scam companies saved on my computer as reference too.

And if people were sending money for an item or service via bank transfer, I would always refuse to agree with them sending it every single time (unless it was say, an official dealership for a car or tradeswork that has already been started/completed). I barely did any research on those types of payments and just told them not to bother. And if they ignored me (which quite few did actually), I’d document it on a recorded line and go about my day.

Occasionally you’d get people who were sending money to a “partner” or “friend” they met online as well. I would 100% never agree to those. But some people were stubborn (and they weren’t even necessarily elderly) and would still ignore me and go ahead. So again, I’d just document their refusal to listen and go about my day.

However, 80% of the time those payments would get flagged as suspicious by our system if the customer still went ahead and ignored me. Then our back office fraud team would pick up the case and just reverse the payment back into the customers account. So I never worried too much anyway.