Sign in
Sign up

No Scrooges Allowed: A Blueprint for a Happy, Scam-Free Christmas

As the festive season twinkles on the horizon, the burning question isn’t just about finding the perfect gifts but also safeguarding our precious pounds from the grinches of the digital realm. While the allure of delightful presents may be depleting our bank accounts, the real concern lies in defending our finances against the sneakiest online threats. At TallyMoney, we’re not just unravelling the secrets to smart spending; we’re arming you against the crafty grinches lurking in cyberspace. ‘Tis the season to be merry, savvy, and a step ahead of those festive fraudsters!

Since the arrival of ChatGPT in 2022, scammers have upped their game, expertly crafting messages that resonate with nearly everyone and automating their tactics for swift exploitation. It’s a tricky landscape out there, isn’t it? 

Consider this: The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) reveals that nearly two-thirds of parents feel the pinch to overspend during Christmas. And a staggering 40% of UK adults worry about meeting the costs. For parents with children under 18, this number climbs to 52%! With such pressures everyone is looking for a bargain – and the holiday season becomes a playground for scams.  

Did you know that over a quarter of parents with young children either borrow or plan to borrow money just to cover the festivities? This surge in financial strain opens the door wider for potential victims of loan fraud – a situation where paying fees for a loan that never materialises becomes a harsh reality. 

Here’s the kicker: Scammers are cunning. They prey on urgency, pushing for quick payments or unusual requests. Wondering how to outsmart them? Follow these precautions:

  • Cold calls and emails: could it be a scam?
    • Question the unexpected: If you receive an unsolicited call or email, treat it with scepticism.
    • Guard Your Information: Never share personal details unless you initiated the contact and are sure of who you are speaking to.
  • Upfront fees: a red flag
    • Pause and ponder: If asked to pay an upfront fee, hit the brakes. Legitimate services typically don’t demand payment in advance.
  • Unusual urgency: the telltale sign
    • Take a breather: scammers often rush their victims. If pressured to pay quickly or unusually, take a step back and assess the situation.

Fraudsters are crafty operators, diving into tactics like loan fraud, leveraging urgency through cold calls, emails, and demands for quick payments. Loan scams are just a fraction of their arsenal; there’s a plethora of techniques at play:

  • Scam delivery texts and emails
    • Ever received a text or email claiming your package is delayed? Clicking the link might lead you to a phishing site. Watch out! Forward suspicious texts to 7726 and scam emails to report@phishing.gov.uk. 
  • Fake and copy-cat websites
    • Beware of enticing deals! Some lead to fake websites tricking you into malware downloads and non-existent purchases. Authenticate a website by typing the address or go to getsafeonline.org/checkawebsite. 
  • Bogus charities
  • Gift card scams
    • Fraudsters impersonate contacts to request gift cards, claiming illness or payment issues. Call your friend or family member on a trusted number if in doubt. 
  • Social media shenanigans
During this festive season, unwrap with caution. If a call feels dodgy, an email appears suspicious, or a payment request raises an eyebrow – pause! It could be a scam. After all, ’tis the season to be vigilant!
 

Wishing you joyful seasons greetings from all of us at TallyMoney!

Continue Reading

How to beat the hidden tax on your savings

READ ARTICLE

Are your savings working for you, or a bank?

READ ARTICLE

Saving strategies: how often should you save?

READ ARTICLE

Let’s get physical: How much gold bullion and printed fiat currency actually exists?

READ ARTICLE

Why Faster Payments aren’t always so fast

READ ARTICLE

How to get a TallyMoney account

READ ARTICLE

Real World Examples

  1. Fancy a coffee? Use your TallyMoney Mastercard. Boom – paid. (Yes, you’re buying a flat white with gold. How amazing is that?)

  2. Need cash? Use any Mastercard ATM worldwide or spend across the globe. ZERO fees from us, ZERO markup. (When you spend or withdraw, your gold converts instantly at the global spot price. No catches, no hidden charges – just straight-up Mastercard exchange rates. Because your money shouldn’t cost you… more money.)

  3. Want some money back in your bank? Just tap ‘transfer’ in the app. (Though after a while, you might wonder why you’d want to…)

    Zero faff. Zero waiting. Zero fees when you spend tally.

Meet Cameron Parry

Meet the guy who wouldn’t accept being trapped in a ‘heads they win, tales we lose’ government-run monetary system that protects and benefits the financial institutions, to the detriment of the public. Where people’s deposits are constantly at risk, and losing value through inflation caused by central bankers and politicians.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then frustration may be the roommate’s cousin of motivation. In any case, he decided to stop getting mad and start a new monetary system with sound money. Where deposits serve the depositor, where savings build wealth for savers, and transactions are made in a familiar way. And he called it TallyMoney.

TallyMoney: Gold upgraded

With TallyMoney:

  • Your pounds instantly become physical gold (1 tally = 1mg of real gold)
    Stored in Swiss vaults (not under your bed)
  • Fully insured and allocated (actually yours, not a paper promise)
  • Spend it anywhere with your TallyMoney debit Mastercard
  • Transfer back to pounds instantly if needed (but why would you?)

We’re not anti-bank because it’s trendy. We’re anti-bank because the current system is rigged against you. Every day you leave money in a “savings” account, you’re funding their profits while your wealth evaporates.

Enter gold: the original currency

Why gold? It’s value is universally acknowledged.

  • It’s not controlled by any single government
  • It can’t be printed or manufactured
  • It’s actually scarce 
  • It requires effort to extract it 
  • It doesn’t rust, decay, or disappear
  • It has remarkable properties

So while the pound’s lost 50% of its value since 2004, gold’s grown by 146% in the last decade alone. While your bank savings got mugged by inflation, gold owners were laughing all the way to… well, not the bank.

But here’s the rub: Traditional gold ownership is a right pain. Buy physical bars? Prepare for storage fees that’ll make your eyes water, insurance premiums that never end, and a 5-10% haircut when you need to sell. Plus, try buying your weekly shop with a gold ingot.
Paper gold ETFs? They’re classed as Tier 3 assets for a reason – that’s financial speak for “risky as hell.” You don’t own gold, you own a promise. A tradeable IOU. And when everyone wants their gold at once? Good luck with that. So you’re stuffed either way: real gold that’s impossible to use, or fake gold that might not be there when you need it.
Until now.

The truth about inflation

How? Well, when politicians overspend (and they invariably do), they need more money to ‘stimulate the economy’. But raising taxes makes voters angry. So what do they do? They fire up the money printer, and boy do they love to print. To give you a sense of the scale, since 2015 the Bank of England has created £520bn out of thin air through “quantitative easing” (electronic money printing) plus £86bn in physical currency. 

Thing is, more pounds in circulation = each pound is worth less. Think about it: In 2004, £100 could buy you a decent night out, theatre tickets, and a cab home. Today? That same £100 barely covers the theatre tickets. Your money didn’t disappear – it was diluted, like someone’s been topping up your whisky with water when you weren’t looking.

The “2% inflation target” they bang on about? That’s them telling you they plan to steal 2% of your wealth every single year. And calling it healthy.

How TallyMoney actually works?

  1. First things first: we’ve got actual gold bullion* (none of that paper-promise nonsense) locked up tight in a Brinks vault in Switzerland. Yeah, those Brinks – the security legends who’ve been protecting valuables since Queen Victoria was on the throne.

  2. You send your pounds to your TallyMoney account (bye-bye, inflation-addicted fiat!).

  3. We use the global gold spot price to instantly turn your currency into its weight in gold. No hidden or fuzzy exchange rates, just the real market gold price + 1.49% gold purchase fee.

  4. Each milligram of your physical gold = 1 tally (we keep it decimal because no one wants to faff about with troy ounces – the specific unit for measuring gold).

  5. That’s it! Your app shows your balance in tally, but remember – those aren’t just numbers on a screen. That’s your solid gold, in milligrams, sitting pretty in Switzerland.
  6. You can now save and spend your gold as you see fit.

*All Tally gold is sourced from LBMA-accredited providers because we’re rebels with a cause… and standards. Instead of tracking the gold price per kg, your money is directly converted based on the real-time global gold spot price.

TallyMoney is 
real money

  1. Store of value
    Your gold sits in a Swiss vault (not getting ‘quantitatively eased’ away)
    Evidenced by 5,000 years of holding its value
    Can’t be inflated by government whim and fingers on the ‘currency print’ button
  2. Medium of exchange
    Spendable at 150+ million shops worldwide (thanks, Mastercard)
    Currency converts instantly at market rates (no sneaky margins)
    Moves as quickly as sending a text 
  3. Unit of account
    1 tally = 1mg of gold. Simple
    Stable enough to actually plan your future with
    Speaks every currency’s language (gold’s kind of a big deal everywhere)

This is why TallyMoney is so much more than just owning Gold – it’s a real financial revolution. We’re not just helping you own gold; we’re bringing back what money was always meant to be. Sound Money for a Brighter Future. Because your hard work and wealth deserve better than being slowly robbed by external forces.

We want you to have real money

  1. A store of value:
    Keeps its value over time
    Insulated from devaluation/inflation
    Actually rare and can’t be created out of thin air
  2. Medium of exchange:
    Easy to use for everyday transactions
    Widely accepted
    Can be transferred efficiently
  3. Unit of account:
    Works like a proper value-measuring stick (imagine if your ruler shrunk every year – mad, right?)
    Splits nicely into useful bits
    Reliable enough to plan your future with

Why does this matter? Because your hard work deserves better than being turned into monopoly money by someone else’s actions. Every time your currency loses value (inflation) its stealing from your past work, which harms your present savings, and your future dreams.