One of our website users received the following phone call:
"First of all the call was to my mobile and came up as an unknown number. The caller introduced himself as being from East Linton Community Police Station and didn't give a name. When I expressed some surprise at the Police calling he went on to say that it was Ok, nothing to worry about. He explained that they were working on an operation to combat rogue traders and were enlisting the help of reputable traders in the area to appear in a quarterly magazine produced by the Police endorsing the services advertised. This would have a sizable distribution to all businesses, schools, hospitals etc over an area with a ten mile radius of East Linton. He appeared to know a bit about me although he kept talking about one side of my business rather than another. He then asked would I be interested in participating for only £125 for a whole year, being the only business of this type being endorsed by the police, at which point I said that we didn't advertise. His reply was that he was looking at an advert on the East Linton website to which my reply was that was the only place we advertised. He then hung up on me without terminating the call.
I called Lothian and Borders Police to try and speak to Kevin Hughes but the call was bounced through to their incident reporting line. They couldn't do anything about it as I had no phone number or other details and said that it was a well know type of scam. They stated that we should be wary of this type of hoax and if the person was stupid enough to try calling back to try and get more details. They also said that anything of this nature actually produced by the police would be free of charge and that false trading of this nature was normally dealt with by trading standards."
So if anyone contacts you like this, try to get further details so that information can be passed o to the police.
