Criminals posing as Police Officers have secured sums as high as £10,000 from unwary members of the public; read about this below, first. CBC has issued another update to its very useful Community Resource Pack. It has 166 pages covering everything you might need to know about coping during the pandemic.
Latest CBC COVID-19 Community Response Pack Issued
Coming barely a fortnight after the previous edition, v16 includes updated material. Some has already been published on this site but there are also some new articles such as:
- Updated info on the vaccine,
- Mythbusters on Coronavirus vaccine & COVID 19,
- Call for specialist volunteers, and
- Updated funding opportunities:
- One-off top up grants for retail, hospitality and leisure businesses to help through to the Spring (see below).
- £594 million discretionary fund also made available to support other impacted businesses.
- Come in addition to
- £1.1 billion further discretionary grant funding for Local Authorities,
- Local Restriction Support Grants worth up to £3,000 a month, and
- extension of furlough scheme.
The one-off top-ups will be granted to closed businesses as follows:
- £4,000 for businesses with a rateable value of £15,000 or under
- £6,000 for businesses with a rateable value between £15,000 and £51,000
- £9,000 for businesses with a rateable value of over £51,000
You can read the whole document (and other material) on our COVID-19 page.
Fraud Warning from Neighbourhood Watch
A Colchester NhW coordinator recently had a very disconcerting call from what turned out to be a bogus Police Officer. The caller claimed to be from the Metropolitan Police Visa Card Crime Squad. The caller sounded very authoritative and convincing – anyone not fully on their guard could easily have been duped. On this occasion the caller chose the wrong person to call and was ‘rumbled’ straight away.
This seems to be an emerging ploy with the local Gazette recently reporting on elderly victims of fake cops.
In each case, criminals claimed to be police officers who were investigating counterfeit money at a bank. They persuaded their victims, aged in their 70s to 80s, to withdraw large sums of money from their accounts.
He managed to scam one victim of £10,000! Please warn friends, family and neighbours, to take very great care. What is described above and in the newspaper, or similar, is never ever genuine.