No. Not sure how. I should of course.
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Done - Thankyou. 
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Just a thought Graham, but perhaps this can be pinned somewhere if you think it’s worth doing?
I used action fraud a few years ago when I had an episode of ID theft. They gave me a case number etc, which did actually help in my dealings with some of the companies I ended up contacting.
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Has anyone else here become their resident scam detector for their friends and family like I have?
It’s not often, but if my friends or family receive an untoward text from PayPal that looks like it could be genuine they’ll always forward it onto me and ask. Same with emails
I must say, emails are far easier to spot at a glance, though they are getting smarter. The amount of times I actually need to go into it on my Mac and inspect the headers is increasing. They’re becoming sophisticated enough to almost fool me at first glance. If I didn’t delve deeper, or have doubt, they’d swindle me most likely.
SMS messages can be much harder. Usually there’s a URL, so if it looks remotely genuine, I’ll type it out by hand into a browser within a virtual machine, and see. I am wary of folks clicking on them directly, because there are certain attacks that can be deployed just from visiting a website. If you’ve ever visited a genuine website for instance that heavily relies on JavaScript and you get forwarded to some scam website offering something for free, you’ve likely unwittingly clicked on such a link at some point.
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Yes.
Mom had the Royal Mail outstanding parcel fee text scam two weeks ago.
Straight on the phone to me. 
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Seconded. Pinning things like that at the top of relevant threads I think will do a good public service.
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A few years ago, my Wife’s Dad got scammed by a fake Microsoft engineer who subsequently gained control over his computer, locked it down and then made a demand for money to ‘unlock it’. He paid up. I was at the time, fuming he’d fallen for it. We had a chat, he knows now never to do it again. I ended up swapping out his hard drive.
Personally, I effectively just ignore everything that comes in on my phone that isn’t in my contacts list. The silence unknown callers thing on iphone is fantastic because it filters out all the scammers because generally, they’ll never leave a message. Scam texts, forward to my provider and block.
Physical mail scams through the letterbox, never see them, though when I sold my former home a few months back, I did get completely unsolicited letters mostly typed, from people like ‘Terry and June’ from Manchester, wanting to view my home. I just passed them onto our Estate Agent who viewed them with as much ridicule as I did.
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Good mantra to follow, I think. If it’s someone or something important, they’ll sms or leave a voicemail.
But my mum likes to have fun with these people, I shared this one a while back on the Monzo forum, but my mum got one of these HMRC scam calls that try to scare you into paying them by telling you there’s a warrant for your arrest. You can hear an example of one here:
She answered it as Johanna Lumley. It was brilliantly hilarious at the time… I’ll see if I can find the post on Monzo and copy it over.
Edit: here it is
I am this person in my family, got a very good looking Royal Mail scam recently so I input the postcode for downing Street and the name of deez nuts
I wanted to have fun with the HMRC “you’re going to prison if you don’t press 1” caller. Pressed 1, then got a work call so had to hang up.
That obviously put me to the top of a list because I’ve probably had 30 calls since 
Before silence unknown callers, if I had a call come in from abroad, places such as Burkina Faso or Macedonia, I would accept the call as quickly as I could just so the call connected and they would obviously then pay for the call. I’d then just leave the line open.They would usually cut the call quite quickly.
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Must say, the Johanna Lumley impression actually put an end to the calls. I’m guessing her number gets put on some kind of blacklist for the people who don’t fall for it.
These are especially scary because no matter how much I try and shelter my elderly family members from the dangers of the internet, they can meanwhile very easily fall victim to something nefarious that’s been put through their real world letterbox - and I can’t exactly go through all of my family’s mail before they open it.
I’d never actually seen a physical mail scam until a few months ago when ‘SSE’ sent a letter to my grandmother informing her that her direct debit had failed and that she needed to take urgent action to stop service being cut off. You can imagine how much this would scare a lady in her eighties, and I honestly wasn’t on guard for people trying to scam her in her own home in the offline world. They also had managed to gather just enough info that made the letter plausible and genuine looking, but the sense of panic it was clearly written to instil set off alarm bells, and upon searching up the phone number printed I discovered it was indeed nothing to do with the actual SSE at all. These people really are scum.
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I don’t understand why smartphones don’t have junk sms filters (that are more sophisticated than just block all unknown numbers), similar to junk email filters.
In the meantime I forward these types of messages to 7726
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That’s exactly what I do, been doing that for a very long time.
I’m sure Google collate a list of scam text numbers and block known spammers.
On iOS, third party apps can filter SMS messages for you. One I know of is called Hiya, which I use for identifying potentially scam calls; I haven’t enabled the SMS spam filtering because it means that the third party app has to process the contents of all messages you receive, and that’s not a privacy sacrifice I’m willing to make, especially not with bank OTPs etc.
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Don’t you also have to pay for the call? I got some calls from China before I ported my O2 number to Zevvle
I’m quite happy for the spam texts come in, they don’t bother me if I’m honest. Block and delete all day long.