My first bank scam! I've heard so much about this one but I never experienced it myself before today. A very nice, soothing male voice said he was ringing from Hammersmith police station. They had just arrested two men who were using my bank card fraudulently. If I had played along, I suppose I would have been guided into opening a new account and transferring all my money into it. I told him he was a scammer and hung up. When I dialled 1471 to check the caller's number, it was "withheld". Needless to say, he didn't ring back.

My card is safely in my wallet upstairs. Of course it could, in theory, have been cloned, but I don't think so.

I found https://www.ageuk.org.uk/barnet/our-.../latest-scams/ which seems to be exactly the approach that was made to me, except that I didn't hang on long enough to get put through to the "secure line".

Anecdotally, there's very few robo-calls tried here, as they get little/nothing. They are used for sales, and some of them play recordings to avoid interruptions.

The last mildly successful one was a message from a major bank saying your account had been frozen, and log in hereIt was a .com site, whereas businesses use .ie urls. People didn't check, the scammers cleaned them out, but the bank refunded. I wasn't with that particular bank.

Generally, it's the younger savvier age group who are contactable by phone/internet, whereas older ones are easier to scam.

In the UK, phone scams are often targeted at old people whereas younger people are more likely to get phishing emails or texts. I think a lot of people of my generation are not online.