For those of us in the Policing family; Preventing crime is just as important as catching criminals and your Local Rurals Neighbourhood Policing team have been busy working on a number of preventative measures to help stop crime across the patch.

We’ve seen a rise in bogus cold callers in the area targeting vulnerable members of the community and while we have been proactively visiting and speaking to people at events around the patch about how best to go about dealing with cold callers I’d like to take the opportunity of this weeks WMNow to provide some helpful advice on some of the practices cold callers will use and how best to protect yourselves from being a victim.

Two of the biggest cold callers we see around this time of the year are “Nottingham knockers” and rogue builders.

Nottingham Knockers are usually young men who go door to door with a large holdall style bag selling vastly inflated household products. They are dropped off early in the morning in a particular location by van and are then transported around that area throughout the day.  They will often claim to be on a prison release scheme and want to try make a better life often brandishing a poorly handmade ID cards.  We often receive calls from the public, who state that upon declining the products they are selling have been subjected to verbal abuse and threats to cause criminal damage.

Other cold callers we see are people claiming to be builders who will have noticed a problem with your property while passing by and offer to repair it for a price, upon agreeing to the work they will often and conveniently find other problems to charge for whilst carrying out the work, and those charges will often sky rocket into thousands of pounds, these people may also provide grounds keeping services and or claim to have a spare load of building material and offer to tarmac your drive way for a reduced price.

Whenever you get an unexpected knock on the door, please check to see who is on the other side of your door before opening it. Either look through a side window, a spy hole or simply ask out loud who it is. If you do not know them, establish who they are and what they are there for before you open the door.

Please remember if the cold caller sales are unsuccessful, they are unlikely to return in future however if you are unsure of the validity of the callers and wish to let us know then call us on 101 or if they are being verbally abusive and making threats at being declined a sale then do not engage them further and call us on 999.