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Fraud

edited February 2014 in Not Sports Related
I've been absent from here today, looking into an offer by phone & e mail, which I have concluded is a fraud.

They were saying I had a stock option to purchase shares in a company that took over a company I used to hold shares in.

Extremely convincing & I nearly fell for it, despite me always being incredulous of people that do fall for scams.

Anyway, no one wants to do anything about it. It's pathetic.

I reported it online to The FCA who possibly do diddly squat.

I reported it to The Scottish police as the fraudsters gave an Edinburgh address. They said report it locally.

I reported it locally & they were very nice, but said I needed to report it to actionfraud.police.uk.

I reported it online to them & the info requested was worse than useless & no way could they investigate anything from that. It was just to record an attempted crime imo.

So I phoned them up, held on the line for 5 mins, then the line went dead.

Absolutely ******* useless !

If anyone wishes to commit a fraud I suggest you go ahead as it appears no one is in the least bit interested.

And breathe.

PS Should I delete the e mail ? Is there a risk in keeping it ?

Comments

  • and yet just try opening an ISA at your local bank or building society and they will want to know where you got the money from, your passport or driving licence details, etc etc.
  • Did you try the Daily Mail? Tell them the Wolf of Shenfield called you. They seemed obsessed by that story.
  • Abuse them on twitter with some politically incorrect language.

    Then when you get prosecuted you can explain exactly why you did it.

  • Bloody Scots.
  • Hi CE
    You could email tony.hetherington@mailonsunday.co.uk. as he looks into all these scams
  • Thought it was another Sordell thread.
  • Thought it was another Sordell thread.

    That's not fraud, that's daylight robbery!
  • edited February 2014

    Hi CE
    You could email tony.hetherington@mailonsunday.co.uk. as he looks into all these scams

    Yes, contact Tony. He has good contacts at the FCA as well and may well publish details which will be good for other potential victims.

    The FCA has a large Enforcement Department and publishes warning lists of such scams. They should take note of what happened to you. Was the firm that contacted you on here? fca.org.uk/consumers/protect-yourself/unauthorised-firms/unauthorised-firms-to-avoid Or here: fca.org.uk/consumers/protect-yourself/unauthorised-firms/foreign-warnings

    Action Fraud is now the correct police contact point nationally. If they've been rubbish and their complaint form was useless, start a complaint about them! Mind you, the concept has to be better than the old system. No individual police force apart from the City of London properly resourced their fraud squads with officers with a brain. Many Forces actually shut down their fraud squads entirely!

    Two further things: first you weren't actually a victim as you sussed it out. It's quite likely that the authorities will already be aware of this matter and will have received other complaints, so they won't see you as a priority.
    Second, it is highly unlikely that the Edinburgh address has any real connection with the fraudsters. It's probably just a mail drop at most. In the past, most of these scams were set up in Spain to take advantage of differences in Spanish law that meant the local authorities could not investigate unless there was a local victim. But I think that an EU directive closed that loophole.

    If you still get no joy from the authorities PM me the details and I'll make sure someone at the FCA gets them.
  • The FCA won't touch it with 10-foot pole, mainly because it is too small to go after, no money has actually been lost by you and it'd be terrible PR if someone found out they were investigating email scans and not the big investment banks.

    Action Fraud is your main point of contact. Very much doubt they will even begin to prosecute - they probably get reports of email scans a thousand times a day and can't investigate every one. Boiler room scams only seek to get shut down when enough people have been duped in handing over cash as 'Police discover £100m scam' is better PR than 'Police uncover 5 quid scam, spend thousands in order to prosecute'.

    Fraud is historically hard to prove and prosecute for. I would only expect to see an email scam and the perpetrators taken to court if enough money has been stolen and there is enough evidence to prove they were acting fraudulenty.
  • Fiiish said:

    The FCA won't touch it with 10-foot pole, mainly because it is too small to go after, no money has actually been lost by you and it'd be terrible PR if someone found out they were investigating email scans and not the big investment banks.

    You are right to an extent; in that they have to prioritise investigations. But one of the FCA's statutory duties as laid down by legislation is the reduction of financial crime.
    Each new complaint adds to the likelihood that they will do something. The FCA employs a large group of people in its Enforcement Division dealing solely with unauthorised and therefore illegal activity. Other people deal with the investigations into the authorised community. The FCA can and does do both. If you look through its list of press releases, it will give you an idea. In particular they like to look out for new trends in fraudulent activity so they can be stamped upon from a great height. The FCA's success against so-called land banks is a prime example. The fraud was flourishing but has now almost disappeared. If people don't tell them, of course, they won't know.
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  • edited February 2014
    As I have already said. I reported it to The FCA by way of an online form. It says that you are unlikely to hear from them, so you have no idea, whether anyone even looks at it.

    The local police took scant details and gave me a reference number, but said they wouldn't investigate.

    I filled out the Action Fraud "form" online, which was basically : contacted by landline, followed up with an e mail, from a purported financial institution & was requesting me to send money. That was it. You can't investigate anything from that. A complete joke.

    If I wanted I could possibly get the bank details from them, if I rang them & said I wanted to send the money.

    I could investigate it & already have a damn site more than any authority "appears" to want to.

    I don't care about me personally, but I'm pretty certain as I type this, people are sending money to them & it makes me very angry.

    I've been rather busy today, but maybe I'll e mail Tony Hetherington tomorrow.
  • Covered End, if you aren't going to take up the stock option you mentioned, can you pass it on to me please? I have some contacts in Lagos who are VERY interested in just such an investment....
  • As I have already said. I reported it to The FCA by way of an online form. It says that you are unlikely to hear from them, so you have no idea, whether anyone even looks at it.

    It'll be looked at Covered End.

    The thing is the legislation the FCA works under contains confidentiality provisions that preclude them from letting you know, well, anything at all really. (Although there are get-outs to the non-disclosure rule it remains the default position so I'm not bothering you with the exceptions here.)

    I know that sounds stupid. But the legislation is there for a reason. Primarily, it's not beyond the realms of possibility that the FCA could get an entirely plausible but frivolous or malicious complaint about a firm. Merely by announcing that an investigation was on-going or planned it is possible, perhaps even likely, that the announcement itself would put a small firm/individual out of business. That would not be right if it later transpired that that complaint was unfounded.

    I hope that helps you to understand their position. A member of staff at the FCA would commit a criminal offence by disclosing information and they could lose their job and be banged up for two years - that sanction tends to make them very cautious indeed about what they say and to whom.

    (What is less clear is why the Police aren't required to operate under a similar regime. Perhaps, then, we'd be spared the fly on the wall "traffic cop as cheap entertainment" shows and TV cameras following plod around when they make a high profile arrest.)
  • I inboxed you cafcfan.
  • Stock options are very unlikely to be offered via email and in my experience will all be sorted via your broker. Glad you didn't get stung and def don't worry about keeping the email as you haven't done anything wrong - just dont open any attachments or go to any links as there could be a virus.
  • The programme that was on telly a couple of weeks ago showed some people (2 blokes & a woman) who string the scammers along, even enticing some of them to do silly things, one bloke made his scammer go to cornwall and watched him as he clambered up a coastal path to a small churchy type building then went and told him he was winding him up! One of these blokes has made it a full time job to waste the scammers time in order to try and put them off doing it again, perhaps you could get him to look into it
  • 419eater.com
  • jac52 said:

    Stock options are very unlikely to be offered via email and in my experience will all be sorted via your broker. Glad you didn't get stung and def don't worry about keeping the email as you haven't done anything wrong - just dont open any attachments or go to any links as there could be a virus.

    I already opened the attachments. I had to really as I didn't know it was a scam, before doing so :-(
  • edited February 2014
    http://bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26367166

    @Covered End sorry you felt that no one was interested and Action Fraud and police services are far from perfect in their customer service/complaint handling for stuff like that but anyone who does get targeted should stick at it as it can only help with investigations like the above.

    The more pertinent question is, are those @LoOkOuT‌s monogramed slippers in the article? I always wondered how he afforded that private island...

    image
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