'My debit card was cloned': Sarah Coles explores the scams consumers should be aware of

Fortunately, I was alerted by my bank asking me to confirm an online payment. I rejected pending fraudulent transactions, cancelled my card, and called my bank to let them know I’d been a victim of fraud. They’ll refund me eventually – and if they later decide I’ve been involved in some sort of Inception- style event that enabled me to be on my sofa and simultaneously on the south coast, they’ll take the cash again.

I’m lucky, because I’m so alert to the risk of this sort of thing that I have an emergency fund to fall back on. The criminals struck a week before payday and emptied my account, so without this, a week of half-term holidays would have been much harder. It’s a useful reminder of the power of an emergency fund. You don’t need to be sitting on a fortune to make a difference. If you can set up a direct debit to pay into a savings account at the start of the month, for whatever you can afford, you’ll eventually be grateful for every penny.

Card cloning isn’t the kind of fraud we tend to hear about very often, but it was still responsible for losses of £395.7 million in 2022. That’s almost four times as much as from people physically stealing cards – or using lost cards, and almost eight times as much as is taken when a criminal opens or takes over a card account in someone else’s name.

The fraud that grabs all the headlines is authorised push payment fraud, where somebody convinces you to transfer cash into their account. This is partly because it’s even more common - we clocked up losses of £485.2 million in 2022. It’s also because it involves human emotions that are far more complicated than disappointment that your scammer isn’t more of a flamboyant spender.

These scams come in all sorts of guises, and they play on a range of emotions, but fear and panic are two of the most common. Criminals might call or send a message pretending to be from your bank or the police, warning that your account has been compromised, so you need to transfer your money to protect yourself. In reality, this would never happen, but it’s not hard to see why people get caught up in the stress of the moment.

Other variations include contacting people and warning them they have to pay a fine or settle a bill immediately or face horrible consequences – like having their electricity cut off or being arrested. Again, this isn’t how you would hear about an outstanding bill, and the consequences don’t come out of the blue like this.

Other scams play on your kindness, empathy or love. These can include ‘romance scammers’, who target people on dating websites, and after a whirlwind online romance, concoct a tale of woe and ask for money. Others will pretend to be a friend or family member in need of emergency funds – usually contacted by text message or through social media. We all need to be on our guard for requests for money like this. If you think a family member might be in trouble, contact them another way and check.

Some versions of the scam prey on our money worries, claiming that if you pay a fee you’ll get a large payment. They might say something is being held at customs, or there’s tax to pay before you can inherit money. Unfortunately once you pay, they’ll disappear.

Less dramatic, but equally horribly effective, are purchase scams. The plain vanilla version is where you buy something from an online auction, social media platform, or fake website, which doesn’t exist. More complex versions include convincing you they’re a legitimate company you owe money to. Their approaches can range from spoofing numbers, so they end up in a series of text messages from the company you’re buying from, to hacking emails or online accounts.

And this world is set to get more dangerous and murkier, as AI comes into play. It can automate stages in the scam, to attack more victims more effectively. It means your online romance in future might not be with a scammer – but a robot scammer – which is even more depressing. They can also make existing scams more effective. So when pretending to be a loved one asking for money, they can replicate their voice in messages.

It means we need to be alive to increasingly sophisticated risks in the battle against fraud, and always assume that an approach is a fraud from the outset. Meanwhile, of course, it pays to be alive to the risks posed by the kind of low-level criminal who carries off a debit card fraud, then hightails it via coach to the nearest KFC.

The cost of being single

The cost of being single takes a horrible toll. On paper, singletons have to spend hundreds of pounds more a month to sustain the same lifestyle as a couple, but research using the HL Savings & Resilience Barometer reveals that in reality, the cash just isn’t available.

Singles are forced to spend around a third more on housing per person than their couple counterparts – despite living in cheaper accommodation. They also spend more per person on fixed costs like food and communications. It means they have to cut costs wherever they can, so they spend around 16% less than each of the couple on household goods and services, 7% less on clothes and shoes and 5% less on recreation and culture. They spend a third less on buying and running a car.

Even this leaves them worse off. A single person living on their own has an average of £117 at the end of the month, much less than half of the £372 a couple has left over. They also have less to put aside in savings, and find it much more difficult to save for a property. It’s one reason why singletons are less than half as likely to be homeowners as couples. And it takes a toll over the long term too, with less than a third (32%) on track with their pension savings, compared to almost half of couples (48%).