Beware of cyber crooks who discover your EU payment
Therefore, the most important reaction by farmers is to bring down the shutters against the inevitable onslaught of criminals clever enough to find out on the Department of Agriculture website how much you get in direct payments from the EU, and who will seek to get their hands on some of your money.
In the UK, farmers and their single farm payments have become a major target for cyber crooks, robbers who do all their crime sitting at a computer.
The publication of your full name and municipality, and the amount of your payment, now helps these criminals to target you.
If they can track down your phone number, expect callers who will try to convince you to part with your cash.
Farmers across the UK have lost sums ranging from tens to hundreds of thousands.
Typically, telephone callers posed as the farmer’s bank, the police, or some other trusted organisation, and claimed that fraud had been detected on the farmer’s business or personal account, and that immediate action was required to remedy the situation.
The victim is then tricked into handing over key financial information or transferring funds into a so called ‘safe account’ (which is controlled by the criminal).
Of course, banks will never request full online banking passwords, nor request a payment, over the phone.
But many UK farmers nevertheless were taken in by the fraudsters.
Be careful on the telephone, if you get a call about your money, presume it is someone trying to rob you.
And if your broadband is fast enough to enable you use email a lot, watch out for fraudulent emails, don’t give away any of your details, no matter how convincing the message you get.
Up to 2010, details of payments to all Irish farmers were available on the Department of Agriculture’s website — but to discover who got what money required a computer search for specific recipients in specific locations.
This ended when the EU Court of Justice ruled in November 2010 that the EU’s disclosure of payment data relating to individual persons was a disproportionate violation of the right to personal privacy. In response, the European Commission ordered member states to stop publishing data, and in April 2011 issued an interim regulation requiring them to publish only data on payments to companies and partnerships.
But the European Commission came up with a new regulation in 2013, which obliges each member state to return to annual publication of most beneficiaries of CAP funding, including some 130,000 Irish farmers who are beneficiaries of about €1.8bn from EU funding.
The EU and many of its citizens justify this on grounds of complete transparency of where public money goes.
But for many farmers, it is a serious invasion of their privacy.
Fortunately, it is not a very straightforward exercise to extract the name of a farmer and how much he or she gets from the EU, through searching the Department of Agriculture website.
Nevertheless, having their names published will add to the fears of thousands of farmers living in isolated rural areas, worrying that it could bring robbers — not on the telephone, but breaking into farmhouses.
EU farm payments include the Single Farm Payment, headage, Agri-Environment Options Scheme, REPS, Burren Scheme, and Grassland Sheep Scheme.
But the total comes to no more than €14,000 for the average farm family.
The few thousand euro that most farmers get is a small enough amount to require having your name and payment published.
