Scam Mailing

Debate between Chi Onwurah and Heather Wheeler

Wednesday 30th January 2013 Westminster Hall

[Heather Wheeler (South Derbyshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Sheridan. I thank Mr Speaker for allowing us the opportunity of having this debate on scam mail and postal fraud, which impacts on the lives of hundreds of thousands of the country’s most vulnerable people. The elderly and those in debt are among those who are deliberately targeted by fraudsters because they are seen as a soft target and easy to con.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) who has been championing the issue for some time. If her ten-minute rule Bill had received Royal Assent, it would have gone a considerable way to eradicating the issue, by empowering the Royal Mail to take definitive action against those engaging in postal fraud. Regrettably, she is on parliamentary business elsewhere and cannot attend this debate. None the less, I am deeply grateful to her for the input and support of her office.

Let me outline the nature and scale of the problem before making some suggestions as to how the issue might be easily resolved. For the avoidance of doubt, when I use the words “scam mail” I am not talking about the perfectly legal mail shots that legitimate companies send out to advertise lawful services or the sale of genuine goods.

I wish to focus on mail shots which are sent for the sole intention of obtaining money through deception—fraud. Such scams include fake lotteries, fake lawyers promising transfers of large sums of cash, so-called boiler-room share purchasing scams, and even threats of curses put on recipients if they do not send back money to the originators. The scams have many different guises, but, none the less, end up with vulnerable people parting with their cash.

The scale of this largely unreported problem is vast, costing some £3.5 billion a year and growing. Some 50% of the population will be targeted, and nearly 7% will be duped by scam mail, which is carefully crafted to maximise the potential of deceiving the victim. Once the scam comes to light, the victim or, in many cases, the victim’s family, experience a large range of emotions, including anger, shame and upset. In some cases where the loss has been so big, they might even have suicidal thoughts. Indeed, as we heard on the television today, there were five suicides as a result of this matter last year alone.

Sadly, the experience of my constituent Mrs Smith is like that of many others. Her father, a former Gurkha, spends a considerable amount of his weekly pension on these scams. He looks on the payments as his “investments”. He lives in total denial, but believes unwaveringly that one day one of these investments will pay off. He has even told friends and bank managers that his investments abroad are about to mature. Of course Mrs Smith’s father will not admit what he is doing, but everyone knows about it, including his long-suffering wife and daughters. The growing piles of envelopes from the scammer arrive daily and are overtaking the bedroom, and now the summer house is full of scam mail, too, providing clear evidence of the scale of his obsession.

The local post office and coffee shop know him well, because of his routine visits, almost every day, to register post containing the money. He sends up to £150 a week to these criminals. He insists on making copies of letters so that he has proof should he need it. Of course the people in the post office cannot stop an elderly man from sending post. His family feel powerless. They have tried to make him watch BBC exposés, look at the Think Jessica website, and read leaflets and posters. They have tried to get him help from independent financial advisers; orchestrated visits from Derbyshire police officers; and even arranged a personal visit by Marilyn Baldwin from Think Jessica, who tried her hardest to convince him but to no avail. All attempts were met with the response, “That’s not me” or “Nothing I didn’t know already.”

Marilyn Baldwin is passionate about getting “Jessica’s scam syndrome” recognised as a mental health condition. Those referred to as having such a syndrome would be people trapped in the delusional world created by the scammer. Mrs Baldwin feels passionately that calling individuals obsessed with scam mail “victims” or “addicts” is not enough, as it does not explain their behaviour adequately or the torment faced by those trying to protect them.

Scam mail has the potential to make people mentally ill, as it opens up a delusional world that goes deeper than any other addiction or obsession. This inability to get some victims to see the reality of their victimisation and delusions has led some people to ask whether psychiatrists should consider the existence of some form of psychological or mental health condition that drives people to be repeated victims of scams. I strongly suspect that the addictive and irrational behaviours from which many of these victims suffer might be well known to psychiatrists. Perhaps we should consider how existing powers under the Mental Health Act 1983 could be used to empower families and those with safeguarding responsibilities to intervene and save victims, such as Mrs Smith’s father, from their own delusions.

Mrs Smith’s family feel so strongly that they have set up their own action group called “The Fight To Stop SAPCO”—scams and prize cheque offences—which already has a small army of people behind it, including a consumer affairs lawyer from Nottingham, an EU lawyer from London who is aware of international frauds of this type, a private investigator working internationally uncovering perpetrators of international finance crimes and fraud, Derbyshire trading standards, Marilyn Baldwin of Think Jessica, and DC Jim Egley of Operation Sterling at the Serious Fraud Office.

What is most galling, especially to the families of the victims, is that these scams take place with the full awareness of the Royal Mail, which often handles envelopes full of cash that it knows have been fraudulently obtained. Although the Royal Mail is able to recognise when such scams are happening, it remains powerless to intervene, which is a source of intense frustration among postal workers.

Let me turn to the current difficulties in tackling this issue. The nub of the matter is simple. First, there is confusion over the law and what it permits the various organisations involved in detecting and prosecuting these frauds to do. Secondly, there is a patchwork quilt of legislation derived from various Acts of Parliament, which creates a lack of clarity in this area. Thirdly, there is an overly burdensome demand to protect mail in transmission, which means postal workers often observe the scams happening, but are either powerless, or believe themselves to be powerless, to intervene. The result is that the fraudsters continue to profit while the authorities are unable to do anything definitive for fear of acting beyond their legal powers. In effect, no one knows what they can do when a scam is detected, even though they know what they would do if they could.

The law needs clarifying, responsibilities need redefining and powers of intervention need enhancing.

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this debate on this important, but under-reported, issue. It is clear that the purpose of this debate is to discuss postal mail scams, but I hope that she agrees that internet e-mailing scams are also an important problem. When looking to clarify the law over postal mail scamming, attention should also be paid to the consequence of e-mail scamming.

[Heather Wheeler]

The hon. Lady is of course right. If she would like to apply for a Westminster Hall debate on that issue, I would gladly support her. I think the internet may be one byte too many for my 25-minute speech, but I am sure that the Minister, with her breadth of knowledge, will come on to that.

One Bill to amend the three relevant Acts could cover the issue. There is no doubt which organisation is best placed to detect scam marketing—Royal Mail, which says that scam mail is easy to identify both before and when the scam takes place. It wants to be able to pass on the details of suspected victims to trading standards, but its staff feel duty bound, even while observing the scams happening, to observe the Data Protection Act 1998, the Postal Services Act 2000 and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, and not intervene and report the names and addresses of those they believe are being scammed. Those three Acts place obligations on the Royal Mail that, although well intentioned, often run contrary to the detection and prevention of fraud.

The seemingly simple approach of Royal Mail reporting suspicious mail to trading standards officers is particularly hampered because there is some disagreement as to whether disclosure of the victim’s details by Royal Mail is permissible under section 29 of the Data Protection Act 1998. The legal advice received by trading standards is that disclosure of potential scam victims’ details by the Royal Mail is already permitted under section 29 of the Data Protection Act 1998, which says that information can be released if it is in connection with

“the prevention or detection of crime”

or

“the apprehension or prosecution of offenders”.

However, the legal advice obtained by Royal Mail itself contradicts that view, which reminds me of a friend’s quip that if someone asks 10 lawyers a question they will get 20 different answers.

Royal Mail states that it would be a breach of the Data Protection Act 1998 to release details of suspected victims to a trading standards officer, and therefore it does not do so. Consequently, there is complete confusion about what powers Royal Mail has to report suspected scams to the body that is best placed to investigate. However, a Bill could be brought forward to introduce an amendment to the Postal Services Act 2000 and to the Data Protection Act 1998, in order to provide a legal gateway for the release of that information and for Parliament to enable Royal Mail to act against scam mail.

That brings me to the third issue, which is enhanced powers of interception. At the moment, in order to intercept and report scam mail, the Royal Mail, the police or those officials seeking to investigate scams or enforce existing legislation must secure a warrant from my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary to intercept post in the course of its transmission. To issue a warrant, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary would need to be satisfied that it was necessary for the purposes of detecting serious crime, which would need substantial proof. That is understandable given the need to protect privacy, data and even human rights. However, the almost sacrosanct nature that post in transmission enjoys is also a charter for the scammer to carry on defrauding.

Like the legislative patchwork quilt, that burdensome approach is well intentioned but it also works against consumer interests. Again, it could be tackled by an Act of Parliament that gives new powers of interception. However, enhancing powers of interception naturally raises questions about protection of privacy and data. If interception powers were to be introduced without the need for a warrant, there would have to be appropriate safeguards against breaches of human rights. Such powers would need to be controlled using the existing authorisation process, but perhaps with the final power of decision resting at a sufficiently high level to ensure that the tests of necessity and proportionality are satisfied, without needing to trouble my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary. After all, should she not be dealing with matters of national security, defeating terrorism and managing our law enforcement agencies?