A teacher was conned out of £2,000 of savings by a bogus taxman scam.

Southend Council trading standards officers are now urging residents to be vigilant against the "sophisticated and high pressure” scam.

The Kursaal resident, who works as a self-employed music teacher, received an automated phone call at around 2.30pm on March 23, saying that HMRC was filing a lawsuit against her for an unpaid tax debt and that she needed to speak to a case worker.

Her call was then transferred to a bogus HMRC officer, who told her that HMRC had audited her and secured an arrest warrant over a fake debt of more than £13,800.

He said she could stop further actions if she made an immediate payment against the debt.

After more than two hours on the phone, she then transferred the money to the scammers.

It was later that evening that she realised she had been conned and reported it to Action Fraud.

She said: “I usually keep myself vigilant against scams but I hadn’t actually heard of this one and it was so convincing to begin with.

“It came at the perfect time for the scammers because I’d recently been in contact with HMRC about self-assessments, so it didn’t seem entirely out of the ordinary that they would be contacting me.

“They did a lot to keep me in a state of panic the whole time they were on the phone with me. At the time, I just wanted to stop the threat of being arrested for tax debt and I ended up overlooking a lot of red flags.”

“It may sound odd, but when I found out it was a scam, my immediate feeling was one of relief as I knew I wasn’t going to be arrested. That’s how shaken I was at the time. But I’m also kicking myself for having fallen for it.”

Carl Robinson, director of public protection at Southend Council, said: “This is a sophisticated and high-pressure scam that has tricked at least one local resident out of her hard-earned savings.

“The reality is that there may be many other local people who have fallen victim to it whom we are simply unaware of.

“I strongly urge local people to be on guard against this scam and never to hand out bank details, PIN numbers or passwords over the phone.”

Last month, HRMC revealed that it received more than 60,000 reports of scam calls in the six months leading up to January 2019 – an increase of 360 per cent compared to the previous six months.

Many of them followed the pattern described by the Southend resident.