But more dangerous, because they're more plausible, are mails/texts/phonecalls pretending to be from your bank/credit card supplier, fishing for your personal details. The mail will contain a dire warning and a link to click for more details. Don't do it. A real email from your bank will be addressed to you personally, not just your email address, and should contain a personal identifier such as your postcode or the last four digits of your card. It should prompt you to check your account yourself, not by any link within the email, and would never ask you to enter account details.

Similarly, if a robot on the phone claims to be calling from the "Security Department" of your bank, without asking for you by name or saying which bank that is, then it isn't! It will go on to list two or three recent purchases (one of which always seems to be £156.99 at Amazon, because odd numbers sound more convincing) and ask you to confirm them on your keypad. Just ring off quickly.

We were recently unlucky enough to experience a real fraud attempt on a credit card. Our card company requires an OTP (one time passcode) response for online purchases so, when scammers failed to respond to an OTP request, the bank flagged the transaction and sent a warning to our mobile that the card was compromised and had been blocked temporarily, and that we would shortly receive a phone call from a given number. When that phone call came through, it was actually from a robot, but it did ask for us by name and then offered us a selection of years, from which we had to select our birth date. (At that point, we still rang off and checked our account online, and could see that someone had been ordering take-aways on our card.) We rang back, spoke to a real person and confirmed which of the transactions in the last 48 hours were genuine (don't want to get blacklisted in the local supermarket!) then had to cut up the card and wait to receive a new one. So, as you can see, a real scam warning is much more complicated than the scam version.