A ban on pensions cold calling scams "might not work", as scammers could find a way around UK legislation, ITV has reported.

ITV's Tonight programme, "How safe is your pension", aired yesterday 4 May 2017, provided undercover footage of cold calling centres and looked at how pension scammers could evade a potential legal UK cold calling ban.

Since the introduction of the pension freedoms, pension cold calling has been on the rise, with 11 million people targeted with cold calls each year, some with extremely damaging results. As a result there has been a number of talks since last year's budget to put a stop to these threats.

While the government's plans to ban cold calling have been postponed till after the general election, ITV's undercover investigation found that cold calling firms are putting provisions in place in case the ban is legalised.

A senior employee at pension cold calling firm Cherish Premier said: "We've got in contact with a call centre abroad which generates leads. We've got one in Pakistan with five agents on the phones...then India where we've got 10 agents on the phones. We've got two call centres, one in Hungary, Budapest and one in South Africa who also want to do business with us."

"Everyone in abroad call centres, they can do pensions cold calling," he added.

Although a cold calling ban will send out an important message to both customers and rogue firms, ITV noted; it is still evident from firms such as this that the pensions of British citizens could still be targeted from outside of the UK.

Pensions expert Tom McPhail told ITV reporter Adam Shaw: "This is part of the problem, it's that the Financial Conduct Authority can control regulated businesses in this country, the government can make it illegal to cold call in this country, but it can never stop telephone calls, emails, tweets, from all over the world. It cannot control jurisdiction in the world."

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