QI star Alan Davies loses hundreds to ‘relentless’ online scammers

Alan Davies, the star of 'Jonathan Creek', has opened up about being "relentlessly" scammed online, including losing £400 on a PlayStation 5 that never arrived. The actor was left out of pocket in 2022 after falling for a fake listing of the Sony games console.

He also nearly lost £457 to a dodgy website when he was Christmas shopping for his three children - Susie, 15, Robert, 13, and Francis, eight - after finding a discontinued Lego set that one of them had asked for.

Speaking on BBC Radio Four's 'The Infinite Monkey Cage', the 58 year old shared: "At Christmas I had three Christmas lists from three children and I found every single gift on the site from all three lists, including a Lego set that was no longer made. I nearly gave them £457 and then I thought 'this is unlikely' but I was scammed on a PS5 two years ago, that was £400 down the drain."

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Davies also fell prey to a Bitcoin scammer who hacked his Twitter account, now known as X since being bought by Elon Musk. The 'QI' panellist continued: "It's now become almost impossible to contact an actual human being with any company you're dealing with, my Twitter account was hacked by a bitcoin scammer and I couldn't do anything about it. They hacked into my email and I lost my 800,000 followers, not a big fish in the ocean but it was very helpful for me, if I was doing a tour or something."

He continued: "Then I couldn't get back into the account and they said we suspect you are a bot, we don't know who you are and I responded 'Google me', I'm not hard to come by, but at no point in that process could I communicate with a human being."

He added: "What I do when I get the email I'm suspicious of is I have a look at the email address and it's normally jeremy68qzynamibia and I think 'hang on a minute, that isn't Carphone Warehouse'."

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