Friend In Focus - Mitch Williams

We discovered the Friends Against Scams campaign whilst looking for advice and information for our customers and staff around being scam aware. I took the project to the Guinness Care Executive Team, and we all agreed how important it was that we were involved.

We launched the partnership on 6th May 2020, and we set ourselves a target of training 500 staff and customers by the end of the year. We’re currently at the halfway mark, and everyone who has completed the training can’t quite believe how many different scams there are, and how clever criminals can be.

When we launched the project, our Business Development Director, David, and I decided that we wanted to be ‘SCAMbassadors’ and help raise awareness of the campaign both within Guinness and to our stakeholders. We strongly believe that the campaign and the training itself is so beneficial for everyone, especially with the amount of uncertainty in the world right now.

In the beginning, we did plan to promote the training to our customers. While Covid-19 put a hold on these plans, it hasn’t put a hold on our determination ?" we’ve just had to be a little bit more creative! This month, we’ve launched our annual campaign #Safetember, and have asked our customers how they’d like to be involved in the project, especially as many don’t have access to get online. We’re really excited to see what comes of this pilot, and how we can help reach even more of our customers to help raise awareness of scams.

The Friends Against Scams training doesn’t only illustrate the types of scams and effects    on the victims, it also highlights some of the more subtle signs that someone may be a scam victim. Spotting these signs can be the first step to stamping out these crimes. I hope everyone takes 20 minutes to do the Friends Against Scams training. Like me, they may learn something new.