Members of pension schemes considering a transfer can use a scam predictor tool by Help & Advice to see if they are at risk of falling victim to a pension scam.
The updated scam predictor tool now asks over 20 questions to identify whether a pension transfer is likely to be a scam and provides a list of red flags and explanations as to why that might be the case.
The tool advises the user to either stop the transfer, contact the adviser to get answers to the questions raised by the red flags identified by the tool or contact their pension company, pension administrator, employer, or trustee and request that any transfer payments be halted while they investigate whether the pension is being transferred to a legitimate pension scheme.
People-tech founder Saq Hussain says: “The cost-of-living crisis will inevitably lead to an increasing number of people becoming vulnerable to pension scammers and we want to do what we can to help protect them. The Help & Advice Pension Scam Predictor is free, simple and easy to use and provides a sense check, raising warning flags based on their answers to a range of questions, with clear signposts about what to do next.”
Hussain adds: “The tool is there for people to use to protect themselves against scams. The plan with it is to make it an industry tool, with pension providers giving access to their members. The follow up from this is that we’ll be able to collect data. Whilst we are not collecting personal data, what we are doing in the background is collecting the answers so we can see if any particular answers are getting lots of high scores or if there’s a new type of scam appearing.
“Our intention going forward is to release quarterly updates. The tool will get a lot of traffic going through it and so the data will become richer. We have pulled some information together which shows what sort of answers we’ve had in the past year but it will be an evolving tool as we see scams start to appear.”