{"id":13386,"date":"2013-07-24T15:29:16","date_gmt":"2013-07-24T14:29:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=13386"},"modified":"2013-07-24T15:29:16","modified_gmt":"2013-07-24T14:29:16","slug":"northern-ireland-to-crack-down-on-scam-sites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=13386","title":{"rendered":"Northern Ireland To Crack Down On Scam Sites"},"content":{"rendered":"

I mentioned in an article in January about how certain websites<\/a> are purposely making themselves look like the official DSA site in order to snare learners when they book their tests. The same company was also pulled up again<\/a> in May for other claims deliberately designed to mislead candidates. More recently, another company was also telling carefully crafted<\/a> tall tales and was prosecuted and heavily fined (in that one, a \u201cpass protection guarantee\u201d was only valid if you scored 42\/50 (the pass mark is 43 \u2013 anything else and you fell foul of the small print).<\/p>\n

It seems that Northern Ireland<\/a> is encountering similar problems \u2013 and not just where driving tests are concerned. A European Health Insurance Card is free from the NHS, yet people are inadvertently paying for them from these scam sites. Trading standards acknowledges that these sites aren\u2019t strictly illegal, but that they do deliberately mislead and deceive.<\/p>\n

Damien Doherty of Trading Standards in Northern Ireland said: “While the majority of these sites are legal, they are highly cynical.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Too right they are. He adds:<\/p>\n

It is important that companies are clear about the service they are offering, and do not trick people into paying for something that they can get for free or much cheaper on government websites.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Personally, I don\u2019t think they should be offering any sort of service under these circumstances. It should be illegal, and driving test scam sites are a prime example. The top-dog, highest level company which actually carries out the tests (DSA, or DVA in NI) offers them at a fixed price and anyone charging more than that is a lying scammer, no matter how \u201cclear\u201d they make it in the small print that they\u2019re charging a premium.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I mentioned in an article in January about how certain websites are purposely making themselves look like the official DSA site in order to snare learners when they book their tests. The same company was also pulled up again in May for other claims deliberately designed to mislead candidates. More recently, another company was also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[80,81,85,87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adi-related","category-driving-test-related","category-dsa-related","category-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13386"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13386\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}