Councillors urged to freeze out rogue traders and fraudsters

East Riding Council members are being urged to extend the number of areas barring cold callers after the authority received almost 100 complaints in a month.

There is now a network of 160 No Cold Calling Zones within the borough after the initiative was launched five years ago and councillors are being encouraged to propose more in the worst affected areas.

A report going before the council’s corporate and communities overview and scrutiny sub-committee on Thursday warns of increasingly sophisticated mass marketing scams, which target victims by post, telephone or email, and the shocking lengths to which cold callers go to obtain money from some of the most vulnerable people in society.

A total of 95 complaints about unscrupulous doorstep traders were made to the council’s trading standards department between July 1 and August 4.

In one incident, which is now the subject of a criminal investigation, rogue traders visited the home of a recently widowed woman and persuaded her to have her drive cleaned for £3,200.

She told her friends she felt “very uncomfortable, frightened and scared” and when the callers returned she offered them £400, but they demanded £800.

The callers followed her to a cash point, but she could only withdraw part of the money so they then followed her into town and blocked her car in at a car park while she went to a bank for the rest.

Reporting the incident, the woman told trading standards officers: “They knew I was alone and my husband had just died.”

In another case a man with mental health issues was pressurised into signing up to have a new alarm system fitted on credit for £3,100. The “credit agreement” said he had an income of £20,000 when in fact he was unable to work.

The man cancelled the contract but the trader arrived on the last day of the seven-day cancellation period and fitted the alarm anyway, leaving the victim, “very agitated, confused and upset”.

The credit agreement was eventually cancelled after an advisor at a Community Legal Advice centre in Goole intervened on the man’s behalf.

The report, by Nigel Leighton, the council’s director of Environment and neighbourhood services, said victims or often targeted repeatedly and vulnerable consumers are reluctant to report scams for fear of reprisals.

But the report also says the No Cold Calling Zones have proved popular and effective and are recognised by reputable traders, with six major energy companies recently agreeing to do so.

In a 2009 survey of residents living within the zones, 95 per cent of the 132 respondents said they would recommend them to others, 94 per cent said they had been successful, 81 per cent said they now felt more confident turning cold callers away, 79 per cent felt there had been a significant reduction in the number of cold callers, and 69 per cent said they felt safer since the zone was established.

Concluding his report, Mr Leighton said: “Scams and rogue doorstep trading are a huge problem for the whole of civilised society.

“The originators of the problems are constantly thinking of new ways to take people’s hard earned money from them. They also go to incredible lengths to avoid detection.

“However, in the last five years trading standards and their partners have made considerable progress in both educating the public to their dangers and in taking effective enforcement action.

“The success of the No Cold Calling Zones has shown that society is willing to take some action to reduce the effectiveness of these evils. By working even more closely in the future trading standards and its partners can take real steps forward in the fight to reduce their impacts on society.”