My daughter needs her passport renewing and Mrs S was responsible for organising it.

She entered Passport Renewal into Google and up pops a variety of sponsored links. From Google she clicked on Childrens Renewals which directs her straight to the input page of uk-passport.net. She enters all the required details and pays the fee of £32.95. She believed the fee was for the passport.

Anyway today the credit card bill arrives and looking down the transactions, I query with her what UK-passport.net is for? I have a look at the website and it is a passport checking service (well an automatic data loading service really) and if you go to the home page is states that they are not linked to the official passport site. Unfortunately for my wife she never saw the homepage as the link took her straight to the input page. She spoke to the credit card company but unfortunately they can’t refund the payment.

Anyway I’m not really bothered about the money, but what concerns me the most is the fact that the data my wife provided included our full names, address, date of birth, passport numbers, phone numbers, email addresses, credit card details etc etc. We are ex-directory, registered with the telephone preference service, on the edited voters role etc but now uk-passport scammers.net have our details, are we likely to be inundated with spam, PPI text messages, junk mail etc?

FWIW – I highlighted to Mrs S this evening that a) The Government/Identity and Passport Service don’t pay for sponsored links (Well they don’t have any competition do they?) and b) They don’t use dot net domain names! I really thought she was smarter than that and certainly didn’t expect her to get caught out. Lets hope a Nigeria Prince doesn’t email her within a few days? 😉

Anyway has anybody fallen for this or a similar scam and did you receive an increase in the junk you received?

There are similar sites for NHS health insurance card.. Its free from the NHS site but others charge for the same service.

I know people that fell for the EHIC card one. Even tried to convince my parents that the renewal now cost £20. Absolutely adamant that it was no longer free. Fortunately my parents knew it was free, and went to the right site (I think the URL on the car actually links to the right place?).

Must be hundreds/thousands that have fallen for it. I’d be getting new CC numbers and be wary of ID theft.

Anyway I’m not really bothered about the money, but what concerns me the most is the fact that the data my wife provided included our full names, address, date of birth, passport numbers, phone numbers, email addresses, credit card details etc etc. We are ex-directory, registered with the telephone preference service, on the edited voters role etc but now uk-passport scammers.net have our details, are we likely to be inundated with spam, PPI text messages, junk mail etc?

That above is the easier bit to deal with …

What you don’t want is having to proof you are who you are in future. i.e. someone using your identity for something else and you are to be blamed for except that they don’t believe you.

Or someone applying passport in the details you have just provided …

Once I signed “yes” to some offer … now I get PPI text now and then.

Info from their website below….. send them an email instructing them to remove all personal data from their systems.

We will not sell, distribute or lease your personal information to third parties unless we are required by law to do so. You may, at any time, request that any of your data that we have collected as a result of you placing an order with us be removed from our systems. To do this, simply send an email to sales@uk-passport.net stating your full name and instructing us to remove all personally identifiable data from our systems. Your data will be removed within 24 hours.

There was a warning about this on “The One Show” the other week, shortly after the wife had paid £19.99 to renew our EHIC’s 😳

There was a similar tale on here a couple of weeks ago, that time regarding the CSA but the same trick, direct click on a sponsored link.

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/blatant-rip-off-firms-im-fighting-back

Seems to be a trick that’s catching on.

Well I just clicked on their google sponsored link which will cost them £££££.

That’ll learn ’em.

Info from their website below….. send them an email automatically instructing them to remove all personal data from add your email to their spam systems.

Credit-card chargeback… 💡