A FOOTBALL club chairman has slammed the fraudsters who stole thousands of pounds from their youth team’s account as “disgusting”.

Gary Pleece, chairman of Montpellier Villas FC’s Youth division, has spoken out after more than £4,500 was scammed from the club’s charity bank account through a fraudulent scheme.

The money had been meant to fund the seven youth sides which the Falmer-based football club runs, and following the theft, these teams’ futures were thrown into doubt.

While Metrobank, with whom the club’s account was held, have since arranged to replace the money, but Mr Pleece told of feeling “completely violated” by the fraudsters’ actions.

He said: “It’s disgusting that people could do this to an organisation like ours, or to anyone.

“The money they took is the difference between these kids being able to play football and them not being able to.

“I felt completely violated by this scam, and I think it’s important that other people are aware of how these fraudsters operate.”

A spokeswoman for Metrobank said: “The scammers in this instance saw an interaction of Mr Pleece’s on twitter and then contacted him by telephone, purporting to be calling from our organisation.

“They asked for details that we would never ask for via telephone, and used these to extract money from the football club’s account.

“Our social media is totally secure but unfortunately this is quite a common scam where fraudsters look out for customer service interactions and then make contact with targets.”

On their website, Metrobank advises that customers should never respond to suspicious calls, texts or emails.

A spokesman for the bank said: “Don’t follow links sent to you in emails and texts as we’ll never ask you to do this.

“Don’t tell anyone your four-digit PIN, even the bank or the police.

“We’ll never ask you to move your money to a new account for fraud reasons or send someone to your home to collect your card, cheque book or cash, even if you’ve been a fraud victim.”

Statistics released by UK Finance show that in the first half of 2018, customers lost more than £500 million to fraud. Of this, £145 million was lost to “authorised push payment” scams, where targets are tricked into approving a fraudulent payment to another account.