Even the best of us can fall victim to a scam, as the Pensions Age team saw just this week, after a colleague wrote a post on social media about some concert tickets she was looking to sell.

Excited by the opportunity, we all missed (or perhaps purposefully ignored) the obvious spelling errors, the fact that the post sounded, quite honestly, nothing like this person, and the fact that she had never mentioned this in person – we simply wanted it to be true.

But as one member of the team pushed us to confirm with the individual in question, our hopes were quickly dashed as we realised it was a hack.

It’s not an uncommon experience, scams and fraud are of course built to entice people with exclusive opportunities, giving the impression of a closing window of chance that you have to grab, often with a bank transfer or deposit to show your faith, or risk missing out.

Indeed, research from Wealth at Work shows that 13 per cent of those who have lost money to a scam in the past 12 months did so through fake promises of guaranteed returns or early access to their pension.

And whilst we are all used to being told, if it’s too good to be true, it likely is, this can be hard to remember in a moment of excitement.

Even this rule of thumb becomes more difficult when you get into the many nuances of pensions - after all, how many of us have tried to encourage a friend and family member to save into their pension with the offer of ‘free money’ from their employer and the hopes of investment growth, whilst also warning savers about the risk of scams and fraud that promise ‘free money’.

Savers could therefore be forgiven for feeling like they are getting mixed messages in terms of who to trust when it comes to their pension savings.

And when savers do fall victim, the blame is often thrown on them, even when it comes to the potential tax charges they could face as a result of pension fraud.

It is also important to remember that this can happen to anyone, including those in the pensions industry, and in that case it is not the only the individual at risk, but potentially huge amounts of member data and money.

This is a of course known issue in the industry, and many systems are in place to protect savers’ data, but behind the secure systems built by these massive organisations are individuals, who often make human errors.

Ask the question quietly, and many industry professionals will confess to accessing their emails from a personal device, or on an unsecured public wifi, often despite company warnings to the contrary.

Others are more bold - one gentleman at a recent industry conference was happily working on very confidential scheme numbers and member data in clear view of fellow audience members in the auditorium – simply putting the brightness down when others tried to point out he had prying eyes on either side of him.

I like to think of myself as pretty tech-savvy, but even I was tempted to ignore the signs and take a chance on a potential scam, and it seems likely that at least one of the thousands who work in pension schemes across the UK could be tempted too. So it’s important that we discuss this openly and make genuine improvements going forward to address this.

If a trustee does fall victim to a scam, they can’t waste time worrying about, they need to admit the error, and get to work fixing the problem.

Whether it is a member, or even someone in the industry, it shouldn’t be a source of shame to fall victim to a scam.

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