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UK to ban all cold calls selling financial products

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The UK is to ban all cold calls selling financial products as part of a national crackdown on scams.

Unsolicited calls offering any financial product will be covered by the ban, with a view to stopping fraudsters selling sham insurance products or cryptocurrency schemes.

A new fraud squad will also be set up with 500 staff, up from 120 now.

But Labour and the Liberal Democrats called the plans "too little, too late".

Fraud is now the most common crime in the UK, with one in 15 people falling victim.

Last summer, 41 million people were targeted by suspicious calls and texts, according to media regulator Ofcom. However, most fraud now has an online element, data suggests.

The government said the blanket ban on cold calls selling financial products would cover legitimate calls as well.

This will mean that "anyone who receives a call trying to sell them products such as cryptocurrency schemes or insurance will know it's a scam", it said.

Exactly which financial products will be covered will be decided after a consultation, with the ban expected to be brought in this summer.

In addition, the government said:

  • So-called "Sim Farms", where people use a large number of Sim cards to send text messages in bulk, will be banned
  • Intelligence services and police will work with overseas partners to shut down call centres engaged in fraud
  • Advertising campaigns will warn people about the risk of scam calls
  • There will be new measures to tackle phone number "spoofing", where scammers alter Caller ID information to make calls look genuine.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said that the new rules will tackle "cold-hearted" scammers who "ruin lives in seconds."

He said these scams fund "organised crime and terror".

'Too little, too late'

But Emily Thornberry, the Labour Party's shadow attorney general, said the plans ignored "the tens of billions being lost to fraud against businesses and the government, and relies on estimates of the cost of fraud to members of the public that are seven years out of date".

Labour said that the government has "repeatedly" left fraud out of the crime figures and they have "no interest in bringing fraudsters to justice".

The SNP's technology spokesperson Carol Monaghan said the government had been "slow to protect vulnerable people".

"Cruelly, pensioners are often the target of such scam artists and the effects can be devastating," she said, adding the government plans and funding were "insufficient" to tackle the scale of the problem.

Alistair Carmichael, home affairs spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats, said: "With only one new investigator for every 9,000 cases last year, the [new] fraud squad is just a drop in the ocean compared to what's needed to protect fraud victims.

"These plans will also put even more of a burden on local police forces who are already overstretched."

Consumer group Which? welcomed the strategy but also criticised the government for not acting sooner.

"More action is needed to guarantee that big tech platforms take serious action against fraud," it added.

The government says fraud costs the UK nearly £7bn per year, and nearly 90% of internet users have encountered online scams.

A Home Office spokesman said £400m had been allocated to economic crime in the last government spending review, including £100m to tackle fraud.