Telephone number: 01309689579

I groggily answered the ringing phone at 6am, and was alarmed to hear an official-sounding robotic voice. “This is the alert system with Visa (or Mastercard) account services!” It went on to tell me that there were two suspicious charges to my Visa card.

We may have entered the digital age, but the telephone remains a key weapon in scammers' arsenals. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) received about 1.8 million fraud complaints in 2021 in which a contact method was identified, and in 36 percent of cases a call was the swindler’s way in.