Most of us just hang up. But one fed-up reader decided to play a very different game when the scammers came calling — and ended up turning the tables in spectacular fashion.
It started on a quiet Sunday morning, just after 11am, when his mobile rang. An automated message claimed to be from Barclays Bank, flagging a suspicious payment of over £1,000 to Argos. There was just one problem. He doesn’t bank with Barclays. And he definitely hadn’t bought anything from Argos.
For most people, that would be the end of it — a quick hang-up and back to the Sunday papers. But this particular reader had reached his limit. He’d been bombarded with these kinds of calls for months, and this time, he wasn’t just going to walk away. He was going to make them work for nothing.
So instead of cutting the call short, he played along.
Bank impersonation scams are one of the most common fraud tactics targeting people across England right now. The setup is almost always the same. You get a call — sometimes automated, sometimes a real person — claiming to be from your bank. There’s a problem with your account. A suspicious transaction. Unusual activity. They need to verify your details immediately to protect your money.
The goal is to panic you into handing over your account details, PIN numbers, or authorising transfers before you’ve had time to think straight. And it works. Thousands of people fall for it every year, losing life savings in some cases.
But not this time.
Rather than giving the scammers what they wanted, the reader strung them along for hours. He fed them fake details, invented account numbers, made up security answers, and kept the conversation going as long as humanly possible. At one point, he cheerfully told them he had £80,000 sitting in his account and offered up a PIN number — completely made up, of course.
The scammers, convinced they were close to a big payday, kept going. They stayed on the line. They asked more questions. They ran through their scripts. And all the while, they were getting absolutely nothing useful — just wasting time they could have spent targeting someone more vulnerable.
That’s actually the point, beyond the personal satisfaction of it. Every minute a scammer spends on a dead-end call is a minute they’re not spending trying to defraud someone who might genuinely be taken in. Older people, those less familiar with how these scams work, or anyone caught at a vulnerable moment — these are the real targets. Keeping fraudsters tied up, even briefly, has genuine value.
The reader described the whole experience as oddly enjoyable. After months of being on the receiving end of relentless fraud attempts, finally having some control over the situation felt good. He knew exactly what was happening, he wasn’t at risk, and he was making their afternoon considerably less productive.
It’s worth being clear though — this approach isn’t for everyone, and it does carry some caveats. Engaging with scammers, even to wind them up, means staying on the line longer than most people should. If there’s any doubt at all about whether a call is genuine, the right move is always to hang up and call your bank back directly using the number on the back of your card or on their official website. Never use a number the caller gives you.
The golden rule with any unexpected call claiming to be from your bank: your bank will never ask for your full PIN, never ask you to transfer money to a ‘safe account’, and never pressure you to act immediately without giving you time to think.
Fraud of this kind has exploded in England in recent years. Banking industry figures have consistently shown authorised push payment fraud — where victims are tricked into sending money themselves — costs people hundreds of millions of pounds annually. Regulators have pushed banks to do more, and new reimbursement rules have shifted some of the responsibility back onto financial institutions. But the scam calls keep coming.
For now, at least one person in England spent a Sunday morning making life slightly harder for the people behind them. And by the sound of it, he enjoyed every single minute.