This is where scammers send a message to a person pretending to be their child, asking for money.
Chris Ainsley, head of fraud risk management at Santander UK, said there has been a rise in fake WhatsApp messages from fraudsters pretending to be people’s children.
He said: “Someone just sends you a text message saying, ‘Hi dad,’ or ‘Hi mum,’ but then they just try to engineer the person into sending them a couple of thousand pounds in some cases.”
In a separate case, Santander customer Marinela Iacob told Express.co.uk about her experience losing more than £150,000 to investment scammers, with some of the payments coming from her Santander account.