Grants, rebates, refunds and appeals

Two kinds of message, opposite direction, identical machinery. One offers you money you are owed. One asks for money someone urgently needs. Both arrive by text or social media, both carry a link, and both work because they are plausible.

Money you are owed

Energy rebates and cost of living payments. A text saying you are eligible for a government payment, with a link to claim. Genuine government support is applied automatically — through your energy supplier, your benefits, or your tax code. You are never texted a link and asked for bank details to receive it.

Council tax refunds. Real refunds happen, and your council contacts you by post or through your own account on their site. Not by text.

Ofgem, HMRC, DWP. None of them text you links about money. HMRC in particular never emails or texts a refund link — see HMRC, the DVLA and the government impersonation scams.

Business grants. A wave of these follows every announcement. Real schemes are applied for through gov.uk or your local authority, and never charge a fee to apply.

The tells

• A link that is not gov.uk. Real government services are on gov.uk and nowhere else.
• A deadline. "Claim before Friday or lose your entitlement." Real entitlements do not evaporate.
• Asking for bank details to send you money. They have your details if they owe you money.
• A fee to release a payment. Never legitimate, in any scheme, anywhere.

Money someone needs

Disaster appeals appear within hours of anything on the news, and a proportion are fake.

Give through the charity, not the link. Find the charity yourself and donate on their own site. The single habit that covers all of it.

Check the register. Every registered charity in England and Wales has a number you can look up on the Charity Commission site. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own registers.

Be careful of crowdfunding. Some is genuine and moving; some is invented, and platforms verify far less than people assume. Giving to a stranger's story is a donation with no recourse.

Street and doorstep collectors should carry ID and a permit. It is entirely reasonable to say you will donate online instead, and a genuine collector will not mind.

Beware the second ask. People who have donated once get contacted again, harder, because responsive donors are a list worth selling.

The safe way to do both

To claim: go to gov.uk yourself, or ring your council or supplier on a number from a bill. Never from a message.

To give: go to the charity's own site, or use the Disasters Emergency Committee for major appeals. Never from a message.

If you want to check where a link actually goes before you touch it, our link checker reads the address structurally and tells you the real domain, without opening the page.

Why these work on sensible people

They arrive during a real news story, about a real scheme, when money is genuinely tight, and they ask for something entirely ordinary. Nothing about being taken in by one says anything about you except that you were paying attention to the news.