The joint campaign from the regulators to warn savers about pension scams has resulted in £33m being "saved from falling into the wrong hands", ministers have said.
In a letter to the Work and Pensions select committee, minister for Pensions and Financial Inclusion Guy Opperman and Economic secretary to the Treasury John Glen stated that the ScamSmart campaign 'was highly successful" and had resulted in a "significant increase" in scams being reported to Action Fraud.
Launched in August by the Financial Conduct Authority and The Pensions Regulator, the campaign targeted pension holders aged 45 to 65, the group identified by the regulators most at risk of pension scams, and featured television adverts highlighting the most common tactics adopted by fraudsters.
The FCA revealed in December that the number of people seeking information about pension scams rose five-fold since the launch of the joint campaign.
In their letter – which was a follow-up to a Parliamentary committee hearing in April - the ministers stated that the campaign had seen 370 people called in who were in the process of dealing with unauthorised firms.
Mr Opperman and Mr Glen explained that Action Fraud routinely collates information about pension and other types of fraud from a number of sources.
Victims of pension scams last year lost an average of £91,000 each to fraudsters. They reported receiving cold-calls, offers of free pension reviews and promises that they would get high rates of return – all of which are warning signs of scams.
The ministers noted, however, that one of the key barriers to gathering reliable data on pension scams is that people may not know they have been scammed until several years after the event, or they are reluctant to report scams.
The FCA has recently revealed it is investigating 20 alleged pension scams.
maria.espadinha@ft.com
