“Hi Mum. It’s me. I’ve changed my number — my phone broke. Can you send me £1,200? It’s urgent.”
If that message ever lands on your phone from an unknown number, everything in you will want to help. That’s exactly the point. It isn’t your child. It’s a scam — one of the most successful message-based scams running, and one that has already cost victims over £1.5 million, according to the UK’s national fraud reporting centre, Action Fraud.
The police call it the “friend in need” scam. Understanding how it works is the only vaccine you need, because the entire trick runs on a script — and scripts have patterns.
The script, word for word
It almost always starts with “Hello Mum” or “Hello Dad”, sent from a number you don’t recognise. The sender claims to be your son or daughter, texting from a new number because their phone was lost or damaged. Then comes the ask: they need money urgently, either to buy a replacement phone or to pay a bill.
Once you agree, the “child” sends you bank details. That’s the part most people miss — you’re not sending money to your kid’s account. You’re sending it to a stranger’s. And some scammers don’t stop at one payment: Action Fraud warns that criminals often come back with further demands until the victim realises what’s happened.
When the City of London Police issued its warning, Action Fraud had logged 1,235 reports of this scam in a few months, with total losses topping £1.5 million. The warnings haven’t stopped since — National Trading Standards and WhatsApp itself have backed a “Stop. Think. Call.” awareness campaign against exactly these message-based scams, and police say they remain one of the cruellest because they exploit the emotional vulnerability of the public.
Why even careful people fall for it
This scam doesn’t work by being clever. It works by being fast. The message creates urgency — a bill, a broken phone, a child who needs help right now — because urgency switches off the part of your brain that checks things. As Detective Chief Inspector Craig Mullish of the City of London Police put it: “Taking a moment to stop and think before parting with your money or information could keep you safe.”
It also exploits something good about you: your willingness to help family. Louise Baxter of the National Trading Standards scams team has described these messages as particularly cruel for precisely that reason — they prey on kindness. Nobody falls for this scam because they’re gullible. They fall for it because they care.
The giveaways, if you know where to look
The message will try to keep you inside the chat. That’s your first clue. The scammer will avoid voice calls and video calls, because a real voice would give the game away. So make this your house rule: a request for money from a new number gets a voice check — a call to their old number, or a voice note. Scammers can fake a lot of things. A live conversation with your actual child isn’t one of them.
The second clue is the payment itself. Read the bank details you’re given. Is the account in your child’s name? A genuine child paying a bill asks you to send money to them; a scammer hands you details that lead somewhere else entirely. And the third clue is the urgency. Real family emergencies survive a five-minute phone call. Scams often don’t.
Watch out for the second scam hiding behind the first
There’s a related trick you should know about, because it comes from people pretending to be someone you trust. You get a friendly message — seemingly from a friend or a group member — around the same time WhatsApp sends you a six-digit registration code by text. The “friend” claims they sent you their code by accident and asks you to forward it to them.
That code is yours, and it lets whoever has it take over your WhatsApp account and lock you out. The rule is absolute: never share a WhatsApp registration code with anyone, ever. And switch on two-step verification so this trick fails even if someone gets their hands on your code — go to Settings, then Account, then Two-step verification, tap Enable, and choose a six-digit PIN plus a recovery email address you can access. From then on, anyone trying to register your number on another phone needs your PIN as well as the code.
What to do if the message arrives
Stop. Think. Call. That’s the official advice, and it’s genuinely all you need. Stop — take a breath before you respond, no matter how urgent the message sounds. Think — does this request make sense? Call — ring your child on the number you already have saved, not the new one. If you can’t reach them, ask the new number for a voice note.
Don’t delete the chat. You can report and block the sender inside WhatsApp by pressing and holding the message bubble and choosing Report — WhatsApp reviews reports like these to shut the accounts down. You can also report it to Action Fraud at actionfraud.police.uk or on 0300 123 2040.
And if you already sent money: call your bank immediately — in the UK, dialling 159 connects you to most major banks’ fraud teams. Then report it to Action Fraud. Speed matters here, because the sooner a payment is flagged, the better the chance of stopping it.
The next time a stranger texts you “Hi Mum”, you’ll know exactly what to do. The whole scam depends on the message arriving before the knowledge does — and now it won’t. For more on keeping your accounts safe, browse the rest of our Online Safety articles; your email in particular deserves attention, because it’s the master key to your online life and every recovery code in this story lands there.
Comments 1