Pensions provider Prudential has taken action to warn IFAs about scammers trying to access payment details.
Money Marketing has seen a message sent to advisers that informs them about emails which appear to have been sent by Prudential but have not.
The message goes onto say the email in question has a person’s name followed by @prudentiaplc.co.uk or @prudentiasl.com and asks for resolution to settling an account payment.
It adds these emails have not been issued by Prudential and urges those who have received them not to open any attachments or links they may contain.
Regulators raise warning of Covid-19 pension scams
When asked about the action taken to counter the scam, a Prudential spokesman says: “This was quickly identified and mass and local communications were issued to advisers informing them of it and urging them not to take any action including opening any attachments or links. Our security and financial crime teams immediately investigated this abuse of our identity.”
Coronavirus related fraud reports are up 400 per cent according to recent figures from Action Fraud while regulators have warned about scammers who target savers.
FTRC director Ian McKenna says: “These emails have malicious content that is very easy to create and difficult for IFAs to combat. You cannot expect a provider to buy a thousand variations of their own domain name so this can happen to anyone.
“We could avoid all of this with encryption as there is far too much email traffic that is not encrypted. Now there are solutions and the answer is we should encrypt all traffic within the industry.
“We have to remain vigilant against these malicious emails and credit to Prudential for calling it out to advisers.”
We got one of these, I have emailed it to Pru but no response as yet.
We have also not received any emails from them to warn us about this; they need to be aware it is impacting all advisers, not just those who have clients with them. I also checked their website before emailing them and there are no warnings on there either. That would be a sensible place to log a key message such as this.
As all our emails are encrypted, not sure how that helps in this case but happy to have that explained to me!
Fine.
But one day an email scammer might send out useful warnings about Prudential. So yoru healine would be:
“Email scammer warns agains Pru late claims payments”, because their behaviour is at teh rotten end of terrible, up to 4 months for a policy surrender value, maturities paid consistently two months late.
They can’t even blame COVID 19 because I wrote to the chief executive about it in January and (as expected) was blanked by this lest user friendly of organisations. I think I am onto another systemic muck up whereby they are now paying out out all the wrong claims payments and that will be another uphill battle.
So, thanks for the warnings, but could you also get your own house in order and then the scam emails might not ring out quite so true.