Dean Butler, Managing Director for Customer at Standard Life, part of Phoenix Group said: “People have a right to know who they are dealing with and cold calling can muddy the waters creating opportunities for fraudsters. Building on the 2019 move to ban pension cold calling and extending it to all financial products has the potential to reduce the scourge of financial fraud which causes a great deal of pain. While pension fraud still exists, there is widespread recognition that the cold calling ban was a step in the right direction which ultimately has made people more cautious of unsolicited pension review calls and other tactics previously employed by some fraudsters.”
Steven Cameron, Pensions Director at Aegon said: “We warmly welcome the Government extending the cold calling ban, which already applies to pensions, to financial products more widely. Scammers are a scourge of today’s society, often tricking people out of savings they’ve spent a lifetime building up. Government, regulators and financial services firms all need to work together to do everything possible to protect our customers. The scammers put huge efforts into finding new ‘creative’ ways of tricking people and just as much effort needs to be put into finding ways of keeping customers safe. It’s an ever evolving picture but a blanket ban on cold calling is a good start.”
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