BBC presenter reveals he has been scammed out of half of his life savings as he warns listeners to beware of bank fraudsters
- Veteran presenter Peter Levy says he lost cash to scammers posing as his bank
- He felt ‘thick’ after falling for the deception despite being aware of scam tactics
- Have YOU fallen for a banking scam? Email [email protected]
A veteran BBC presenter says he has been scammed out of half of his life savings by a scammer who called him up posing as his bank’s fraud department.
Peter Levy, who presents regional news programme Look North, admitted that he had fallen for the scam despite conducting interviews on how to avoid being swindled in the past.
He told BBC Radio Humberside’s Richard Stead that he felt ‘stupid’ and ‘thick’ after learning that he had been duped by a criminal who phoned him one evening in February claiming there was unusual activity on his account.
Mr Levy then gave his online banking login details to the fraudster – who proceeded to help themselves to cash before his real bank stepped in to cut them off.
The presenter, who has been a regular fixture on TV screens in the north of England for decades, said he had struggled to sleep after learning he had fallen for a scam.
Have YOU fallen for a banking scam? Email [email protected]
‘Nobody knows about this here but I was scammed out of half of my life savings earlier this year and it was traumatic,’ he told Mr Stead in the clip, available on BBC Sounds.
‘I literally hadn’t been to sleep overnight because it was so stressful and it is the most horrific, horrific feeling. It is absolutely awful. You feel stupid, you feel thick.
‘It’s still being sorted out, just this lunchtime I’ve been to a bank. It’s awful.’
He recalled: ‘It was about 7.20 in the evening. They ring up and they’ll say, “this is the fraud department of (the bank) here, we’ve noticed some unusual activity on your account. Have you spent £500 in the last hour?”
‘And I said: “No, I haven’t spent £500 in the last hour, I’ve been at work”. (They say) “Oh in that case we need you to log on to your account, we need to make some security checks”.
‘And of course I logged onto the account and of course it wasn’t the fraud department of the bank at all – it was a fraudster.
‘I’ve talked about this on the air, I’ve listened to interviews, I’ve done interviews and I fell for it and I fell for it badly and got caught.’
He added that he was sure a ‘very high percentage’ of people have been a victim of scams ‘whether it’s thruppence ha’penny or half your life savings’.
Mr Levy continued: ‘Either way it is so traumatising and upsetting and everything. It’s dreadful, absolutely dreadful.
‘You can’t sleep, you can’t do anything, you feel helpless.’
He added that he was guilty of using the same password for most of his accounts – something security experts advise against as fraudsters can then tap into multiple accounts if they manage to learn the codeword.
‘I’ll be honest, I’ve got the same for everything. I don’t use Peter1234, it’s a lot better than that, but it is the same thing and you shouldn’t do that,’ he said.
Referring to password managers, which can generate and save hard-to-crack passwords, Richard Stead replied: ‘You can get little gadgets that does it for you. It offers you and then stores it on there. That’s what I tend to do on mine.’
BBC presenter Mr Levy added that his bank had told him of other scams to watch for – such as QR code scams that see genuine codes for parking meters and electric car charging points replaced by fraudsters.
When scanned by an unwilling victim, the codes direct users to fraudulent payment pages that are used to steal banking details.
‘There are scams going on at the moment and this is a good one to remember,’ Mr Levy said.
‘You go into the car park, a public car park, there’s a queue for the pay machine, so you want to scan the app on the wall and pay like that.
‘Don’t do that because those are… they’re putting stickers on and (people are) getting caught.
‘Queue, be patient, don’t use the thing on the wall: 26 people got caught in a day in Hull by that.’
Mr Levy hit the headlines recently after getting a case of the giggles while trying to report on a footpath in Lincoln – because of its rude-sounding name.