How to avoid premium rate scams How to spot

Holiday scams are some of the most common

Fraudsters will contact you via letter, text or telephone message. You'll be told you have won a major prize but you'll have to ring a premium rate 090 number for further details.

When you ring the premium rate number you'll have to listen to a long recorded message. These can cost up to £1.50 a minute from a BT landline, and mobile charges can reach £2.50 a minute.

Then you'll be told you've won a large cash prize, a luxury holiday or a car. In reality, however, you'll probably end up with just a cheap item worth less than the money you've spent on the call.

Discount vouchers

People are also sometimes palmed off with a book of discount vouchers, or a holiday voucher with strict conditions attached.

Sometimes householders have received a ‘delivery card' asking them to call a premium rate number to rearrange delivery of a parcel. The card looks genuine and people ring the number mistakenly believing they’ve forgotten about something they've ordered. But instead they receive an item worth less than the cost of the call.

You also might receive an unsolicited text trying to get you to respond to a premium rate number. Don’t.

From our files

In 2005 prize-hotline conman Joseph Boll was sentenced to 200 hours community service after duping people into calling because they thought they'd won a car.

Bristol-based Boll hoodwinked people into calling a £1.50-a-minute number after telling them they had the chance of winning a TVR sports car.

Callers spent up to £9 only to end up being offered a second-hand computer which came with a mandatory year's warranty - costing £116.

Premium-rate watchdog Icstis estimated Boll, who was director of Cutting Edge Telecom Ltd and Pokie Ltd, had conned 'hundreds of thousands of pounds' out of consumers in a series of premium-rate scams.

Unsolicited letters

Boll sent about 580,000 unsolicited letters to consumers between June and September 2003. His firms operated on the basis that 2-3% of people would call the premium-rate line, but that only one in ten of those would write in to claim their prize.

Boll was convicted of making false claims. As well as getting the community service order, Boll was told to pay total costs of £20,000 at Bristol Crown Court.