Protecting your pension savings

• Your financial information and secure login details are valuable, so don’t share them with anyone – even if they’re claiming to be us. We’ll never ask you to tell us these.
• Choose passwords you can remember easily instead of writing them down.
• Scams usually start with someone getting in touch out of the blue. An email, a phone call or text message you weren’t expecting can be convincing, but stay wary and hang up or don’t reply. If you’re at all concerned you should contact your provider.
• Don’t click links or open emails unless you’re confident the email is really from a sender you know.
• If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Stay sceptical.
• Scammers often try to put pressure on you to make quick decisions. Always take your time to check things out before going ahead.
• We’ll never ask you to move money to a ‘safe’ account, so if someone contacts you asking you to do this, it’s a scam.
• Scammers take advantage of current events to steal, so check a trusted source, like the Money Advice Service, regularly to stay a step ahead of the latest scams. Right now, look out for people and organisations you don’t know asking for contributions towards COVID-19 relief.

As well as following the tips in the bullet points, you should:

• Check the contact details of anyone who gets in touch with the FCA’s Financial Services Register to make sure that you’re dealing with a genuine firm.
• Refuse to give out any of your personal, investment or pension details.

Pension scams usually involve a contact out of the blue for an offer that’s too good to be true. It usually involves promising to help you ‘unlock’ your pension by transferring money to a different pension scheme. Retirees and people nearing retirement are targeted because they’re able to access large sums of money.

For more information about pension and investment scams, visit the FCA’s ScamSmart website.

You can find out more about how fraudsters are taking advantage of the pandemic to scam people by reading the Government’s website and FCA’s specialist web page.

If the worst has happened, you can contact Action Fraud police for advice by calling 0300 123 2040 or visiting their website actionfraud.police.uk. You could also call the police directly by dialling 101.