A Guardian Money reader describes spending three hours misleading bank-impersonation scammers after receiving a bogus automated call about an Argos payment. By posing as a confused older customer with £80,000 in his account, he kept the callers engaged and exposed how persistently they tried to obtain card details and arrange collection of a bank card.

The caller, who used the name “Adam”, asked security-style questions, requested a PIN and pressed for debit and credit card numbers. He correctly identified the first six digits of the reader’s HSBC debit card before rejecting the invented remaining digits, then proposed sending a courier immediately because banks were supposedly closed on Sunday. The episode highlights both the sophistication of such scams and the risks of sharing any financial information with unsolicited callers.