The pension cold calling ban will not stop scammers, as they are finding new ways to target people through social media sites such as LinkedIn, according to The Pensions Advisory Service chief executive Michelle Cracknell.

Speaking at the PASA Administration Conference yesterday (13 February 2018), Cracknell painted a gloomy picture for the fight against fraud and urged pension schemes to communicate better with members over the issue.

Her comments come after the government said it is looking to find a “quicker way” to introduce a pensions cold calling ban and pledged to raise awareness over the issue, but failed to set a deadline for when it might introduce legislation.

Cracknell said: “The reason I raise this, is that whilst I welcome the ban on cold calling, I think there is a huge danger that we think cold calling will sort things out, because it won’t.

“Scammers have already moved on and they have already found different ways of contacting people and whether there is a ban on cold-calling or not, there will still be pension scams going on.

“I find it so difficult to understand how it can be stopped because the price is so great for scammers.”

Cracknell believes scammers have moved on significantly and are now targeting social media sites such as LinkedIn to open up pension pots, and she highlighted the risk to pension scheme members once Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) finishes.

“When PPI comes to an end, all those lists, what a good place to start for pensions scammers.

“Another area we are hearing about is social media … scammers are targeting people with different types of jobs and companies that are in difficulty.

“It seems like LinkedIn premium rates are very high for us, but for a scammer, that’s quite a cheap premium to get the sources for people that are based in one company, that they know are going through some form of scheme or corporate restructure”, Cracknell added.

According to the government’s consultation response, 97 per cent of pension fraud cases brought to Citizens Advice stemmed from cold calling.

Despite this, the government has committed to raising awareness around scammers by directing people to Pension Wise, and Cracknell believes this is imperative to fighting what she calls the scammers “hustle”.

She added: “That’s the hustle … they talk about things you understand or anything that people are making a lot of money out of, for example bitcoin. The hustle is really quite easy for them to bring home … to bring your pension fund closer to you into something you think you understand.”

“Pension scams are mainly legal at the moment. Even if you squeeze down some of the dodgy practices of pensions scams then it is only going to pop up somewhere else … some of the scams are completely legal, they are just really bad investments that are high charging.”

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