A van driver has warned fellow motorists to watch out for “brazen” scams falsely claiming to take payments for Newcastle’s Clean Air Zone (CAZ).

Jeff Pickthall is urging people to be on guard for unofficial websites that purport to be taking toll payments for the anti-pollution zone. The 56-year-old, from Heaton, spotted one such fraudulent site when trying to look up the boundaries of the Clean Air Zone last week, as he needed to use his Citroen van to make a beer delivery from his brother’s Out There brewery in Ouseburn to the Microbus pub in Gateshead.

And while he realised that the website was a fake after it requested a £14 payment, rather than the £12.50 charge that vans must pay to enter the city centre CAZ if they do not meet its environmental restrictions, Jeff worries that others could easily be fooled.

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He told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “I was not really in danger of paying them the fee, but I was just astounded by the brazenness of it all. It could trick someone who is perhaps a bit more vulnerable than I am.”

Jeff, who has suggested that council bosses display warnings about the fake sites on electronic road signs and online, added: “I put myself in the shoes of my mother, who is 80. She would be baffled by it.”

After searching online for “clean air zone newcastle”, the top result Jeff found on Google was a sponsored post directing users to cleanairzones.online. He quickly became suspicious of the site, which asks users to make a £14 payment after entering their licence plate number – even if that registration is for a private car, which would be completely exempt from all tolls in the Newcastle CAZ.

The site states that it is “not connected to or affiliated with the https://www.gov.uk/clean-air-zones site or any other official authority administering, regulating or overseeing the Clean Air Zone charge”. It adds that it charges a “service fee for assisting you in the application and payment of driving in Clean Air Zone”.

Newcastle City Council had previously warned in September that a number of motorists in the North East who used a third party payment site had either paid CAZ tolls that they did not have to or found themselves receiving a fine for non-payment as they had not used the official Government site, gov.uk/clean-air-zones.

Labour councillor Irim Ali said at the time: “There are a number of third party websites and providers offering to manage Clean Air Zone payments on behalf of drivers but people need to be aware that these are not official payment channels. Unfortunately many people who have used these websites have found themselves not only paying extra charges but going on to receive a Penalty Charge Notice because their original CAZ fee hadn’t in fact been paid.

“We’re also aware that drivers with compliant vehicles who were not required to pay a CAZ fee have been charged anyway by these unofficial and misleading sites. That’s why we are reminding drivers to ensure they use only the official payment system for all Clean Air Zone transactions.”

Only older and more polluting taxis, vans, buses, coaches and heavy goods vehicles that don’t meet national emissions standards have to pay a charge to enter the Newcastle CAZ, with the toll being either £12.50 or £50.