Scammers love a busy business - protecting your business from fraud

26 November, 2024 · 10 min read

Author

Team ANNA

It’s sometimes assumed that the main target of banking scammers are personal accounts, but businesses are also often targeted. At ANNA, we know that small business owners are often particularly vulnerable to scams, so we’re launching a new campaign to raise awareness and show what we’re doing to protect our customers.

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When you’re busy, you’re vulnerable
Scam Safe Week

When you’re busy, you’re vulnerable

Small businesses are a big target for scammers because they’re often one-person-bands, with one owner dealing with customers, answering enquiries, sorting expenses, issuing invoices and doing the books - all at once. That means that when they get a dodgy call or fraudulent email, they sometimes don’t take the time to stop, think and prevent their business from getting scammed. That’s why we’ve launched our ‘Scammers love a busy business’ campaign.

Protecting our customers

As part of the campaign, we’ve launched a series of attention-grabbing Fraud Lesson pop-ups that will feature in the ANNA app. We know that because our customers are busy, they might not read the whole lesson, so we’ve tried to create simple, direct messages that will have some impact even if customers only give them a quick glance.

We’ll also be sharing these lessons on social media and via email, reminding our customers of the key areas they need to think about.

More than anything else, we want to make sure that our customers stop and think. The vast majority of scams could be avoided if customers took 5 minutes to think about what was happening - which we know is hard to do when you’re flat out running a business.

Scam Safe Week

We launched our campaign to coincide with this week’s Scam Safe Week - a nationwide campaign led by Stop Scams UK in partnership with the BBC to raise awareness of scams, and talk about the strategies we can all adopt to stop scams. As well as scams content on news shows and Morning Live, there were also scam plot lines on EastEnders and The Archers.

ANNA is an active member of Stop Scams UK, an industry-led collaboration of responsible businesses from across the banking, telecoms and technology sectors who have come together to help stop scams at source.

Scam Safe Roadshow

As part of the campaign, on 26 November ANNA’s co-founder Boris Diakonov appeared at the Scam Safe roadshow in Cardiff (home of ANNA’s head office), which was covered by the BBC. Boris and members of the ANNA team spoke about how we protect our customers, and answered questions from the public.

Stay safe

Most of all, remember that if you have any doubts or questions about a scam, or you’re worried you may be the victim of a scam, message us in the ANNA app. Remember that we’re available 24/7.