The expensive bills claims more victims than expected. In an attempt to escape the excessively high costs of electricity and gas, many consumers they have become real prey for the scammer on duty. The economic damage caused by the scams that occurred during these months was equal to 1.2 billion euroswhile the victims involved were at least 4 million.
What pushes unsuspecting consumers into the arms of scammers is high bills. More and more Italians are proving to be open to evaluate all the hypotheses that could lead to saving something at the end of the month. Unfortunately, many families fall prey to scammers, having to deal with a situation that is certainly not very comfortable. During the month of May 2022 there were over three million consumers who have been found to be victims of deception or an attempted scam. Twelve months later the situation has worsened: in May of this year 4 million victims of a scam. The figure is up 28%.
Expensive bills: scams are increasing
Over the last year, high bills have increased the number of victims of scams by 28%. The complaint comes directly from Facile.it and Consumerismo non profit, who jointly started a project entitled: Stop scams. The aim is to come to the aid of consumers and help them defend themselves.
Electricity and gas bills are one of the most important expenditure items for families. And for which Italians fall victim to some scam more frequently. The investigation of Facile.it And Non-profit consumerism highlighted that the the average value of a scam is around 319 euros. Overall, in Italy, it is estimated that the economic damage caused by this type of scam is around to 1.2 billion euros in twelve months. Therefore, an increase of 152% was recorded compared to the previous survey.
The scams arrive precisely in the wake of high bills: victims are deceived by leveraging their desire to save. Mario Rasimellimanaging director of electricity and gas at Facile.it, explains that the project, which has just been launched, has the objective of “educate consumers and give them concrete advice on how to recognize and prevent scams and, if they have already fallen victim to one, report the incident and remedy the fraud suffered“.
The channels used by bad actors
What are the channels most used by criminals to make new victims? Certainly the most used one consists of a fake call center (in 53% of cases). Fraud, however, also occurs via the web, via email in 34% of cases or through fake websites. We don’t even give up on personal scam attempts: in one case out of five the scammer on duty went and knocked on the victim’s door. Fortunately, however, scams carried out via instant messaging apps (5%) and social networks (4%) are decreasing.
Finally, of particular interest is the identikit of the person who falls into the scammers’ trap. Among the people who are most commonly defrauded are people:
- with a high qualification (13%);
- aged between 35 and 44 years (13.3%);
- who resides in the North-West (11.6%).
Six out of ten people, after being scammed, they decide not to report for various reasons. In most cases, those that lead to not reporting are the following:
- the economic damage suffered is low;
- there is a total lack of confidence in the recovery of the sum;
- we fear being judged after believing in the scam;
- the lack of will to inform family members.
