By Gabriella Peralta, The Gibraltar Chronicle, Wed 19th April 2025

A campaign to ‘Safeguard Gibraltar’ from fraudsters, after businesses lost millions in a large-scale scam last year, has been launched by the Gibraltar Bankers Association [GBA] in partnership with local advertising firm Purple Media.

The campaign comes after, according to the Royal Gibraltar Police, £7.5m was reported lost to fraud in 2024.

Successful fraud attempts can be devastating for individuals and businesses.

Last July one of the largest scams ever in terms of victims had fraudsters steal £3.2 million from Gibraltar businesses in a matter of days.

This telephone scam used social engineering and pressure to ambush victims through cold-calls hoping to catch their victims off-guard.

At the time police phonelines were grappling to deal with the influx of calls from companies reporting they had been targeted, with some of the other losses running to hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Almost a year later, the GBA has launched a campaign underscoring crucial advice that could avoid further large-scale losses.

Peter Booth, Country Head of NatWest International, highlighted how education is imperative to preventing successful fraud attempts.

“We continue to see a high volume of attempts by fraudsters and scammers to illegitimately access customer funds,” Mr Booth said.

“We recognise as the CEOs and the heads of the bank locally that we needed to do something that’s coordinated and working with other industry bodies and businesses to tackle fraud.”

“Now from my own experience over the last 18 months the most effective way to do that is education.”

“So preparing businesses, preparing the government stakeholders or all the different authorities really to come together and ensure that we have that right protection in place.”

🔐 Common Fraud Types

• Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud: Cold callers pretend to be bankers and get victims to send payments to accounts they claim are secure or internal—but are actually controlled by fraudsters.
• CEO fraud: Someone impersonates a senior figure to push investment scams.

“It sounds really basic but that is one area that I would say over the last 12 to 18 months we’ve seen people being particularly slack on across the market,” Mr Booth said.

Other advice includes:

• Use secure WiFi
• Don’t download software on instruction from a caller
• Watch out for AI-generated cloned voices and spoofed caller IDs

“That’s why it’s important to have a campaign which comes across banks, across all customer bases, because there are very few successful frauds or scams which happen as a result of people following the official guidance,” he added.

🌍 Global Issue

• Fraud cost in the UK: £1.2 billion
• “Unsustainable” and difficult to recover
• Scammers use multiple accounts to move money fast

“We hire very trained specialists… but that can take some time,” Booth said.
“So it’s just that vigilance and acting quickly that could be very helpful.”

Booth also shared how he personally stopped further fraud on his account by reporting a suspicious transaction immediately.