householders have been warned about a clever postal ploy that failed to dupe canny York pensioner Keith Elsworth.

The scheme involved delivering official-looking cards - strikingly similar to those left by the Royal Mail when someone is not in to collect a parcel - urging the recipients to phone a special number to arrange delivery of an FM radio.

But any caller would have paid through the nose, because the number was charged at premium rate.

Keith, of Strensall, said one of the cards had arrived through his

letterbox in mid-December.

Bearing a Royal Mail postage paid stamp, it was personally addressed to his wife, Fay, and read: "The above item is awaiting your instruction to arrange

delivery to your address."

The ploy hit the headlines across Britain before Christmas, with reports thousands of the cards had been delivered.

But a spokeswoman for ICTCIS, the premium rate services regulator,

confirmed the telephone number advertised on the card had now been switched off after huge numbers of complaints.

Keith, 77, said he had in fact ordered the same radio from online auctioneers ebay as a Christmas present for his wife, but had already received it.

He immediately spotted the telephone number advertised was for a premium rate line, charged at a whopping £1.50 a minute.

He said: "As soon as I saw it was an 0906 number, I knew it was a premium rate line and I was immediately suspicious.

"Anybody not as sure as myself would ring up and think they were going to

get another radio; that something has slipped up on delivery."

Liz Levett, York's trading standards chief, said five people in York had complained about receiving similar cards since September.

She said: "Our colleagues in Ealing are looking into it, because they were getting lots of complaints. There's a possibility it could be referred to the Office Of Fair Trading.

"Be very, very careful. Offers of something like this are obviously too good to be true. If you haven't entered a competition, you're not likely to have won anything.

"If you're going to collect something from the Royal Mail, as we all know, all you do is go down to the local office or ring the Post Office. The Royal Mail would not give you a premium rate phone number."

But she said the scheme was not, as far as she knew, actually illegal.

A spokesman for Royal Mail confirmed the cards had nothing to do with the organisation, bar the fact they could have been delivered by its postal workers.

Updated: 10:08 Monday, January 02, 2006