Take five is an initiative run by UK Finance and HM Government. For those not familiar, UK Finance is a trade association for the UK banking and financial services sector, formed in July 2017. It represents nearly 300 firms in the UK providing credit, banking and payment-related services. Together with the Government the Take Five campaign has been created to educate the public in relation to fraud. Fraud poses a major threat to the UK. It’s a crime that the finance industry is committed to tackling, but it’s also one that requires the combined efforts of every sector, both public and private, to overcome.
Take Five is a national campaign that offers straight-forward and impartial advice to help everyone protect themselves from preventable financial fraud. This includes email deception and phone-based scams as well as online fraud.
The primary message
The campaign is basically pressing home the message of thinking twice before committing any monies that may end up being fraudulent. At TCA we have always said never pay any money on the strength of a cold call, in essence Take Five is saying just that, take 5 minutes to weigh up the pros and cons before committing to any form of payment or instruction on the strength of a phone call, email or letter.
According to the Take Five website criminals successfully stole £1.2 billion through fraud and scams in 2019. Timeshare fraud is certainly represented in this figure as we know all too well from calls and correspondence we receive every day via our help desk.
Our message
Our message has always been to take your time, carry out thorough investigation and your own due diligence before committing. A worrying facet of the timeshare peripheral business is that the fraudulent companies outweigh the legitimate companies many times over. As we have said before an unfortunate part of manning our advice line is that more often than not callers have already paid some monies to scammers before contacting us. If only these victims had taken the time to carry out their research before the event, they would have saved thousands. Take 5 offers sound advice although not specifically timeshare related the message is stop, think, investigate, reflect, challenge and protect.
Our endorsement
TCA cannot be happier than to endorse this initiative. Any high profile scheme that helps to protect consumers and stamps out fraud must be applauded. Please visit the Take Five website and above all accept and act on the advice given. Fraud and scams only exist because people fall for them. We would far rather prevent timeshare owners getting involved in the first place because if the wise questioned what they were about to do and pulled back timeshare fraud would rapidly die out, no deal, no money = no fraud.
For more information regarding this article or assistance in any other timeshare related issues please contact the TCA on 01908 881058 or email: info@TimeshareConsumerAssociation.org.uk