Protect your family gold

How can you better protect your valuable gold?

• We would advise you to remove the jewellery from your house altogether, so if you are a victim your valuable items won’t be stolen. Keep all gold, jewellery and other valuables in a safety deposit box.
• If you would prefer to keep gold and jewellery at home, invest in a good quality safe, which complies with official insurance rating standards and is secured to a wall or to the floor.
• To ensure your safe is the best possible standard, visit: www.securedbydesign.com - a Home Office approved website which lists approved security products which have been awarded the 'Police Preferred Specification' status, or www.soldsecure.com - which lists products approved by the Master Locksmiths Association.
• Try to avoid decorating the outside of your home during religious festivals and events. This could attract burglars, as they may believe that jewellery or other valuables are inside the address.
• Consider listing your phone as ex-directory.
• Be discrete when wearing your jewellery especially in crowded places to avoid drawing unnecessary attention to yourself.
• Take photos and keep a list of all valuable property in a safe place, including make, model description and value.
• Forensically mark items of value which offer a hi-tech way of linking your property to your address, options available are – Selecta DNA / Smartwater. Always take specialist advice before marking expensive or irreplaceable items.

Stay safe on social media

• Consider your privacy settings on any social media platforms and avoid posting about weddings, festivals or other celebrations, where someone may be able to identify that you are not at home or that you own high value jewellery.
• Do you need to tag yourself as out or at a venue other than home? Location sharing -is it needed? Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and more give you the option to turn location tracking on or off. Turning this feature off is the safest option.
• Don’t post that you are on holiday or out until you return? This includes photos. This is a common problem you see on Social Media. What until you return home.
• Do you need to share your date of birth, email address, home address or phone number on your profile? You might have to provide some or all of them to the website, doesn’t mean you have to display them on your profile.
• Friend or Follower? Are your “friends” people you’ve met or people that have added you? Don’t add or accept people you don’t know, even if they are a friend or a friend. Are they a friend of a friend or has your friend just added them anyway.
• The most important thing you can do to protect your social media accounts is using a secure password. Consider getting a password manager to store all your passwords for your various social media accounts. If possible set up Two Factor Authentication. Further advice about passwords can be found at Get Safe Online
• Make sure your privacy settings are up to date. Whenever a social media app updates, there is a chance that the privacy settings have changed. On Facebook there is an option to see what your profile looks like to someone who is not on your friends list, plus you can set it so it doesn’t appear on internet searches.
• Do you want everyone to see what you post? Who can see your photos? If you only want people you’ve approved to see what you share, you should set your accounts to private. You can do this with practically every social media account. You can also adjust the privacy settings on individual posts to limit who sees each one.
• Conduct a Google (or other search engine) search for your name. What do you find? Something that links you to a home address? Or to a job or gym or place of worship?
• Before sharing a photo with your followers, examine it for anything you may not want to share with others, for example a selfie that shows your laptop which shows your online banking information in the background. Also check to see if the exif data is included in the photo. Exif data will show the GPS coordinates of where the photo is taken. Do you want someone knowing where you are? The website should show or say if this is included or not, Facebook for example takes it out while WhatsApp doesn’t.

You can deter a burglar from entering your home by:

• Make sure you double-lock any UPVC doors by lifting the handle and locking it at all times.
• Check all doors are locked and all windows, including those upstairs, are secure before you go out or go to bed.
• Use timer switches on lamps to give the impression somebody is at home or keep a light on in the evening if you go out.
• Consider installing alarms and ‘dusk to dawn’ security lighting.
• Consider installing a CCTV camera outside your property.