I am reaching out in the hope that some of you will be able to help Trading Standards, who are currently hoping to reach students (primarily 1st years) with their short survey around financial scamming.
This issue is so relevant right now and Trading Standards are looking to carry out an Educational Campaign to help protect students from scamming and it would be amazing if you were able to help kickstart this.
Their project aims to expand on a piece of work carried out by student volunteers at Plymouth Uni with Plymouth TS and Devon & Cornwall police. Trading Standards South West has been given the go ahead to roll the project out regionally to see if the results are reflective of wider scale issues about scam reporting, etc. The project is looking:
- To coordinate with universities and further education to benchmark where scams and fraudulent activity is currently reported and explore barriers to reporting
- To gather intelligence directly from the universities and further education centres of the scams and fraudulent activity currently being targeted at their students
- To run an education campaign in Q4 2020/21 based on the emerging threats and intelligence gathered
- To evaluate the project and determine which routes of intelligence work best within these establishments and determine whether a dedicated student reporting mechanism is required, which may be hosted within Trading Standards
Colleagues across the South West are therefore exploring opportunities with their local higher education providers to obtain feedback on the scams experience prevalent within the student population, emerging threats, etc.
Here is the link to the initial survey: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/N86NS8H
Thank you in advance to anyone who may be able to share this with their students.