An 83-year-old woman is urging others to be vigilant after she became a victim of a phone scam.

Ruth Forrester, of Martham, received a phone call from a company who claimed to be a blocking service for nuisance calls, and told her they would be able to help prevent such callers from contacting her.

And following the conversation last week, Mrs Forrester agreed to give her cheque number to the company, who within minutes took £19.99 from her account.

A resigned Mrs Forrester said: 'I was just taken in by it all and I know I shouldn't have done it but they just sounded so convincing and I generally believed what they were saying.

'They convinced me I would be doing the right thing by purchasing their service and within 10 minutes of me giving them my details the money had been taken out of my account.'

Mrs Forrester has since continued to be contacted by other nuisance callers and knows of three or four other people who have been contacted by the same company who took her money.

However, one of Mrs Forrester's main worries is the scam company already knew all of her details including her name, address and phone number.

After speaking with her daughter about the call, Mrs Forrester visited her bank to let them know what had happened and her account was immediately shut down to prevent any more money being taken.

The grandmother now wants to use her experience as a way of protecting others from suffering the same problem as she has.

She said: 'I need to warn other people about this, especially older people who may be more of a target to stay vigilant and to not make the same mistake I made.

'If people are warned about the problem then they can put the phone down on them or simply ignore their calls because hopefully they would then give up and stop calling.

'I was lucky in a way because I only had a small amount of money taken from my account before I reacted, but they could quite have easily cleared me out completely.'