Funeral prepayment schemes are common, with people prearranging their funerals by prepaying some of the related expenses. Unfortunately though, anonymous scammers can exploit people’s decision to opt for one of these schemes.
“My mother had given me a card with some information on it saying that she had paid for a funeral plan,” Marie said.
“When she gave this to me at the time, because it was a plastic credit card that looked legit, I just stuffed it in a tin in the cupboard.”
Both Marie and her mother believed that the card, inscribed with the words
‘Funeral Trust Membership Card’, meant that the funeral had already been paid for.
They believed this because it contained a seemingly legitimate reference number.
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It also included two telephone numbers that Marie did not initially call.
One of the telephone numbers was falsely labelled as a bereavement line.
The day after her mother passed away, Marie began preparations.
One of her first steps was ringing the telephone numbers on the card that she was given by the fraudsters.
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After ringing both numbers, Marie realised that they did not exist and that her late mother had, in fact, been scammed out of £4,000.
“When you Google that company, there’s quite a lot of information [that appears in the search results] and I think there’s a lot more people paid a lot more money to them and have obviously never got their money back,”…
