Criminals targeting vulnerable widows in North Yorkshire... by checking obituary columns

It is a photograph that illustrates the massive scale of the challenge facing North Yorkshire’s ‘scambusters’ team when it comes to dealing with frauds against vulnerable and elderly residents.

The detached house overgrown with vegetation shown in the aerial image is occupied by an isolated widow who became a victim of cold-calling criminals who defrauded her for substandard roofing work.

But the existence of the woman and the crime against her was only uncovered when the scambusting team uncovered what had happened to her through examination through criminal bank accounts as part of a wide-ranging investigation into doorstep crime.

North Yorkshire County Council’s Multi-Agency Safeguarding Team – also known as Operation Gauntlet - is constantly dealing with the fall-out from doorstep crime, telephone and mail scams. Since last July, the team has successfully prosecuted 21 offenders, with criminals being sent to jail for a combined 23 years.

It was the first of its kind in the UK to tackle both vulnerability and financial abuse; an initiative which came out of a restructuring of the county council’s trading standards service.

The majority of victims are older, vulnerable people many of them alone and isolated.

North Yorkshire is England’s largest rural county and has a growing older and isolated population, making it rich pickings for doorstep and other criminals. For this reason, the team also aims to tackle the loneliness and isolation that often leads people to become repeat victims.

Up to 40 per cent of doorstep crime victims say they are lonely and 25 per cent say they feel lonely every day. For many of these victims the fraudster may be their only significant human contact.

Answering the phone, a letter or opening the door to these people may be the only social contact victims are getting.

North Yorkshire’s chief executive Richard Flinton, a former trading standards officer himself, knows all too well the lengths criminals will go to exploit isolated and vulnerable victims.

“You would be surprised how many people have nobody in their life as they get older, literally nobody. Victims might be former solicitors, doctors, professionals because they are the ones with money. They might have lost a spouse; their family might live far away. They have nobody to talk to; they might have health issues; they lose the confidence they once had. Fraudsters go through the obituary columns to identify potential victims. They know how to get people to open their door to them.

“We had one man in the Malton area who had been defrauded of £250,000 over eight years for property repairs and other frauds. When we pulled in the fraudsters he was grief-stricken. He thought of them as his best mates. They’d become his only male company.”

One 91 year old woman in Hambleton lost £200,000 to mail scammers over two years. She was answering letters and writing cheques every day. But she didn’t want the letters to stop. She was widowed and lonely with only one distant relative and the letters were her only regular contact with the outside world.

In all such cases North Yorkshire’s Muli-Agency Safeguarding Team also works to set up social networks for these victims to tackle their loneliness.

Flinton says: “If we don’t tackle the root causes, the loneliness and the isolation, then we are leaving people vulnerable to repeat victimisation.”

North Yorkshire’s chief executive Richard Flinton, a former trading standards officer himself, is proud of the team and its ferociousness in pursuit of doorstep criminals and their assets.

“The population in North Yorkshire is ageing and tackling issues around isolation and loneliness is a priority for us. As part of this we will continue to go after people who see older people in rural villages and towns as rich pickings. Many trading standards departments are shadows of their former selves and shy away from prosecutions. We back Ruth and her team because we must not lose the ability to take these criminals on.”