The United Kingdom Office of Fair Trading (UK OFT) has created a 'scambusters' team designed solely to investigate and eliminate the most prevalent and harmful mass-marketing scams aimed at UK consumers.
The team has been formed to combat scams such as bogus prize draws and lotteries, premium-rate prize promotions, psychic mailings and miracle health cures which mislead recipients.
The new scambusters team will:
continue to target those scams which cause the greatest consumer harm
empower consumers through public awareness
work with postal operators, accommodation address agencies and other service providers to disrupt scammers routes to market.
The UK OFT has also implemented a Scams Enforcement Group which will coordinate the expertise of national and international law enforcement agencies including trading standards, the National Criminal Intelligence Service and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
