Scam Interceptors’ Nick Stapleton on secrets of exposing fraud: ‘It was pretty scary!’

As one of the presenters of Scam Interceptors, Nick Stapleton spends his time exposing criminal wrongdoing and helping the public fight fraud.

But the investigative reporter has revealed he wasn’t always the selfless crusader that he is on screen today. And as a teenager his wild antics caused his parents – campaigning consumer journalists John Stapleton and Lynn Faulds Wood – no end of headaches.

“I was naughty and did bad and stupid stuff that I would never do now. I definitely had my share of close calls with the law. I caused my mum and dad a lot of stress at various points by being fairly terrible, like most teenagers,” Nick admits.

“I did always have a sense of right and wrong which mum and dad instilled from a young age and tried to drill into me. That doesn’t mean you always stick to it as a kid, because you’ve got to learn from your mistakes, but they definitely instilled a moral code.”

In the 1980s and ‘90s, Nick’s parents were two of television’s best-known faces. From 1985-93, they presented the popular BBC1 consumer investigations show Watchdog, pulling in audiences of more than six million as they tackled rogue traders and viewers’ complaints.

But while Nick followed them into television he was determined not to go into the same line of work. “I wanted to forge my own path and not abuse any contacts they had,” he explains. Then in 2013 he was hired as a researcher on the BBC series Rogue Traders where one of his first jobs was going undercover in a second-hand car company.

“I got the bug massively. I couldn’t believe how proud I was. I started doing undercover and secret filming as much as I could,” he recalls. On one occasion he posed as a Ukrainian for a Channel 5 series Undercover Criminal, which exposed companies paying illegal workers less than the minimum wage.

One of his jobs was working for a car wash company.

He says: “It was pretty scary. They were Kosovans and they had some Russian. I had to pretend I wasn’t from the part of Ukraine where they speak Russian, but I could tell they were getting suspicious.”

Another time he was hired to work at a car leasing company by a man who was a cage fighter in his spare time. Five years after exposing the company, Nick was on a train with his dad when he noticed the man and his boss in the same carriage.

“Luckily, I had a scarf so I quickly pulled it up and we changed carriages. Had they recognised us, I think there would have been trouble,” he reflects.

Nick went on to work undercover for Dispatches and as a producer for Rip Off Britain, before landing his current job, co-presenting BBC1’s BAFTA-winning Scam Interceptors with Rav Wilding.

Series three returned this week and Nick’s first book, How to Beat Scammers, is out next year. He will also head out on the road, with his first ever live tour How to Beat Scammers.

Sadly, his mum Lynne died four years ago, but Nick believes she would have been thrilled he has followed in her footsteps.

“Mum would have been really proud,” he smiles. “She spent so much of her time trying to help people and that is ultimately what my tour is about. It’s about helping people protect themselves against scams.

“She never got to see me do on camera stuff – she died in 2020 – but she always watched all my secret filming and was incredibly happy that I was doing something similar to what she’d done.

“Dad’s obviously as pleased as punch, but also slightly gutted, because I won a BAFTA and he never got one!” he adds with a laugh. Veteran broadcaster John recently announced that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at the age of 78.

It was Nick who suggested his dad be tested after noticing worrying symptoms during a holiday to America together in April this year.

“We went for a walk in Central Park and my wife and I thought something wasn’t right – his gait looked different,” Nick recalls. “Increasingly he found that people didn’t understand what he was saying and he has a tremor in his hands.”

John is now taking medication for the condition.

“He’s super optimistic, but he’s also incredibly realistic,” Nick explains. “He’s a bit like me in that when dealing with something very difficult he jumps into practicality quite quickly. He takes a bit of talking to, to draw the emotional side of things out of him, but he’s coped remarkably well.”

Nick is confident John will be there in the front row when his tour opens in February.

“I want to help people tool themselves to be able to deal with cyber crime, because ‘ain’t nobody else coming to save us,” he warns. “The police are convicting one in every thousand fraud cases at the moment and maybe you’ll get your money back from the bank if you get scammed, but in many cases you won’t.”

Nick, 37, who lives in south-east London with his wife Lisa, says he takes inspiration from both his parents.

“My dad has this incredibly long career in telly and I remember watching my mum doorstepping people when I was growing up and thinking that was the coolest thing I’d ever seen,” he says.

“What I also take from her is that she was incapable of stopping helping people. She never rested; she was constantly doing stuff that was to the benefit of others. I take a lot of that into my work – feeling like it’s something that has a positive effect on the world.

“When I want to remember her it’s not difficult, because there are things in everyday life that I see and think: ‘Oh yeah, Mum did that.’ If I ever get anywhere close to that I’ll be very happy indeed.”

Tickets for How to Beat Scammers are on sale now via ScammersLive.com

Nick Stapleton’s top tips to beat the scammers

More than 70% of UK adults have been targeted by scammers, with 35% – a staggering 19 million people – losing money to them. Meanwhile the total value of cyber crime globally would make it the third largest nation in the world by GDP – behind only the US and China.

“It’s mind-boggling,” Nick says. But he insists there are ways to stop scammers getting their hands on your hand-earned cash.

Here are his top tips:

• If anyone contacts you out of the blue, assume it’s a scam. If they claim to represent an organisation, you should say: “I’m not sure that you are who you say you are, so I’m going to hang up and call your organisation back on a number that I can find for them.” A scammer will say anything to keep you on the line. A real organisation will say: “Sure, no problem at all.”
• Messages sent to you out of the blue on social media from someone wanting to be your friend are 100% a scam. Treat them with the same caution that you would a stranger coming up to you in the street and trying to talk to you.
• When you receive an email or text message, always check the sender. On an email you can right click on the name and it will tell you the email address it has come from. Pop the company name into a search engine and click on their official website. If the email you’ve received doesn’t have their official website in the address, you can write it off as a scam straightaway. Be careful what you interact with on social media, particularly ‘sympathy scams.’ Scammers post an AI generated picture onto Facebook, such as a supposed Second World War veteran with one leg, saying: “It’s my 99th birthday today, can I have a wish.” Of course, the human in you will send the lovely veteran a wish. But he doesn’t exist and the scammers get comments from the exact group they want to scam. They don’t need to go out and look for victims, because victims are coming to them.
• If you’re clicking through to buy something from an advert you see on social media and it takes you through to a website claiming to be a big company, make sure you are in the right place and that it’s the company’s official website.