The pension messages that never come from DWP

Every April the State Pension goes up, the increase is reported widely, and for a few weeks afterwards a large number of people are primed to expect something about their pension to arrive. That is exactly the conditions fraud operates in.

The useful thing to understand is not a list of current scams — those rotate — but the structural fact they all have to work around. The annual uprating requires nothing from the recipient. It is applied automatically to an existing eligible award. There is no form to complete, nothing to confirm, no account to verify and no fee to pay.

So any message asking you to do something in order to receive the increase is, by that fact alone, not what it claims to be.

What DWP and HMRC do not do

Stating the negatives plainly is more useful than describing scams, because the negatives do not change.

• They do not ask for bank details by text message or email in order to apply an annual increase.
• They do not ask you to “confirm” or “activate” an uprating. There is no such step.
• They do not charge a fee for applying an increase or for providing your own pension information.
• They do not require payment to release a pension payment — no administration charge, no tax to pay up front, no release fee.
• They do not demand an immediate response under threat of losing an entitlement.

Any one of these in a message is sufficient to stop. Several together are not a more sophisticated approach; they are simply a less careful one.

Term explained: the uprating is automatic

An existing eligible State Pension award is increased without any application. This is the single most useful fact for recognising fraud in this area: the genuine process involves no action by the recipient at all.

Unsolicited pension calls are illegal

This is less widely known than it should be. Unsolicited calls about pensions became illegal on 9 January 2019. The government’s announcement stated that firms making unwanted, unsolicited pension calls may face enforcement action including fines of up to £500,000.

The ban has defined exceptions: it does not catch a call from a firm authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority, or from pension trustees and managers, where the person has consented to calls or already has a relationship with the caller.

The practical consequence is clean. A cold call about your pension from someone you have no relationship with is either unlawful or a scam, and in both cases the correct response is to end it. There is no version of that call worth continuing.

The phrases that should stop a conversation

The one rule that does most of the work

If a single habit is worth adopting, it is this: never use the contact details in the message.

Not the phone number in the text, not the link in the email, not the address on the letter, and not the number read out by a caller. Look the organisation up independently — DWP and HMRC through GOV.UK, a financial firm through the FCA Register — and make contact that way.

This defeats impersonation regardless of how convincing the original message was, because it removes the attacker from the channel entirely. It also costs nothing and delays a genuine matter by a few minutes at most.

Checks worth making before acting

• Is the firm authorised, and for this activity? The FCA Register is free and public. Authorisation is activity-specific, so a firm may be authorised for some things and not for what is being proposed. The difference between regulated advice and general guidance is set out in where retirement help is free, and where it costs.
• Does it match my own paperwork? Your weekly rate is on your DWP pension letter; a tax code is on a Tax Code Notice or payslip. A message quoting a figure that does not match is a reason to stop.
• Am I being asked for anything at all? For an annual increase on an existing award, the honest answer should always be no.
• Have I had a chance to check? Pressure to decide now is itself the warning. Nothing legitimate in this area expires in an afternoon.

Where to report it

Reporting matters even when nothing was lost, because it is how patterns get identified.

• An unwanted or unsolicited pension call — note the company name or number and report it to the Information Commissioner’s Office, which enforces the calling rules.
• Suspected fraud, or money lost — report to Action Fraud in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, or to Police Scotland in Scotland.
• A message claiming to be from HMRC — HMRC publishes a route for reporting suspicious emails, texts and calls, and keeps a list of genuine contact it does make.
• A suspicious investment or firm — the FCA maintains a warning list and takes reports of unauthorised activity.

Why pensions attract this in particular

Three features make pensions a target. The sums are large relative to most household transactions. The subject is genuinely complicated, so uncertainty is normal and a confident-sounding explanation is welcome. And decisions are often irreversible: a transfer made cannot simply be undone.

That combination means the usual advice to “be careful” is too vague to help. The specific defences are better: the uprating needs no action, cold calls are illegal, contact details come from the official source and never from the message, and no genuine body charges a fee to tell you about your own pension.

What the April change actually involved, and what it genuinely requires of recipients, is set out in this pension rise affects millions of Britons — and the short version is: nothing at all.