Farmers Weekly has been alerted to an advertising scam where fraudsters are claiming that they are part of a ‘Farmers Weekly Vehicle Purchase Protection Programme’ in order to persuade farmers to prepay for machinery.

We would like to make it clear that any such claims are false and would urge readers to exercise caution and only part with money when they are satisfied that the seller and machine for sale is genuine.

The Vehicle Purchase Protection Programme is a scam and nothing to do with Farmers Weekly. Beware of any communications using these words or the name ‘Elise Dixon’ or asking for a deposit on the machine.  Farmers Weekly does not take deposits nor operate any middle men schemes. 

To prevent incidents of fraud, we have taken the following actions on our classified service:

*  We have temporarily disabled self-serve posting or editing of online advertisements – this stops scammers from attempting to take control of legitimate adverts and trying to insert their own contact information
*    We removed all sellers email addresses. Buyers can still contact sellers via the ‘Contact Seller’ form or by telephoning the seller, but this stops scammers from collecting email addresses.
*  Technology has also been introduced to block emails from scammers that attempt to impersonate legitimate FWI email addresses.

Please see the security and supply section within our classified service.    

If you have any concerns about suspicious advertisers please email us at fwclassified@rbi.co.uk or call 020 8652 3222.  We take this extremely seriously and the matter has been referred to the police.

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