How To Spot A Pension Scam
Pension scams are on the rise so it’s important to be incredibly careful if you are considering moving funds or making an investment.
Common Pension Scams:
Pension Review Scams. If you are contacted by someone offering a free review of your pension you should be incredibly careful. Professional pension reviews are not free so anyone offering you such a service may well be a scammer. The scammer will typicaly offer you a very attractive return but in truth it is just a mechanism to steal your money.
Fraudsters will often claim to be from an FCA-regulated firm. You can check if a firm is on the Financial Services Register here. Please be aware that some firms will clone legitimate firms.
Early Release Pension Scams: Anyone offering to release money from your pension before you are 55 years of age should be treated with the utmost suspiscion. You can only release funds from a pension without severe penalties if you are 55 years of age, or older. This will rise to 58 years of age in 2028.
Scammers will tell you that you can loan yourself money from your pension but this is not true. Very often the fraudsters will transfer your funds abroad which makes them very hard to recover,
Key phrases used by the fraudster in pension scams are “pension loans“ or “pension liberation“.
You can get advice on pensions from Money Helper.
Warning Signs:
Here are some key red flags to be aware of when it comes to pension scams.
- Offers of a better return on your pensions.
- Telephone calls out-of-the-blue followed by high pressure sales tactics.
- Unsual investment opportunities which are frequently based abroad.
- Investments that are said to be linked to Government grants.
- The use of phrases such as ‘pension liberation’, ‘savings advance’, ‘cashback’ and ‘pension loans’
- Guaranteed returns on your investment.
Read a pension advice report issued by Action Fraud.
Pension Scam Victims Who We Can Help:
We can help pension scam victims if they have transferred funds from their bank via the faster payments system.
In particular we can help:
- Pension scam victims who have been persuaded to withdraw a lump sum from their pension and have then paid it to a scammer as part of an investment / crypto scam.
- Anyone who has fallen victim to an investment scam when setting up a pension with a lump sum or regular payments to a scam pension adviser / cloned firm.
Who We Cannot Help:
We cannot help people who have a pension with a genuine provider which has simply underperformed due to speculative investment, even if it has gone to virtually zero.
How To Report A Pension Scam
Here we outline what to do if you have lost money to a pension scam. There are a variety of bodies to report the scam to in order to start the process of recovering your money.
- Report the scam to Action Fraud.
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If you have been dealing with a Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)-regulated adviser or pension provider you can ask the Financial Ombudsman Service to investigate and decide whether you’re eligible for compensation.
If the firm that you used has now gone out of business, you may be able to recover money from the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS).
- At National Fraud Helpline solicitors we can recover money lost through pension scams if you transferred money via your bank’s faster payment system.
We are a fully-regulated no win. no fee law firm which means that you only pay us if we successfully recover your lost funds.
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