Mirror gets £50k for fraud victim

But scammers behind copycat website escape with their loot

THIS is the biggest amount of cash I’ve helped recover for a Mirror reader – £50,000 stolen by fraudsters.

So why am I not overjoyed? Partly because the poor victim is still £10,000 out of pocket.

And partly because her building society is £50,000 poorer because it refunded the money the crooks got away with.

This began when the 53-year-old single mum from London – I’ll just use her first name Lindsay – downsized her home, leaving her with £60,000 to invest.

She searched online for low-risk alternatives to the low interest rates offered by Nationwide and came across IWI International Wealth Insurer.

It was apparently authorised by the City regulator and the product it offered was as safe as you can get – gilts, a government-backed investment.

“The website was professional and had the relevant details saying it was regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, which I checked against the FCA register,” said Lindsay.

She phoned IWI International Wealth Insurer and dealt with an advisor called Roy Van Dijk, who was “well-spoken, charming and professional”.

IWI set up an account at HSBC for her which would be used to buy the gilts and on November 7 she transferred £10,000 into it.

She was phoned by Nationwide when making the second £10,000 transfer the following day and asked why she was moving the money and given a standard scam warning.

This included checking the FCA’S website – which she’d already done – and the reminder: “If an opportunity appears to be too good to be true, it probably is.”

The government gilts were being offered with 6% interest, which was generous but hardly too good to be true. So the second transfer of £10,000 went ahead, followed by four more, with the final one on

November 15. Ten days later, the FCA published an alert, saying that crooks had created a cloned version of IWI International Wealth Insurer.

Lindsay didn’t realise that anything was wrong until earlier this month when the fake IWI stopped answering its phones.

By then the crooks had emptied the HSBC account.

Lindsay later discovered that when HSBC had accepted her money, it checked only the sort code and account number that she was paying into but not the name on the account, which was not hers.

This month alone the Financial Conduct Authority has warned about clone versions of 24 genuine companies.

A typical example is the long-standing global operation Kurt Barremaecker, whose website is kurtbarremaecker.com.

Crooks have changed one letter to create the clone website kurtmarremaecker.com, a tiny difference that could easily be overlooked.

Worse, the fake site comes above the genuine one in Google searches.

“Most clone firms appear to be based outside the UK,” says the FCA.

“Their websites are almost always hosted overseas, any UK addresses they claim to operate from are bogus, and any bank accounts they use are generally overseas.

“This makes it difficult to take further enforcement action against them beyond publishing consumer warnings.

“The majority of clones involved in fraudulent investment activity tend to stop once we have published a consumer alert against them.”

“HSBC should not have accepted these payments because of the name mismatching, as I’ve learnt it’s called,” she says.

She is also critical of Nationwide. “They should have picked up on the red flags of a 53-year-old woman making £10k financial investment transfers,” she said.

HSBC offered its sympathy while insisting: “We adhere to best practice standards to prevent financial crime.”

In better news, after I took up Lindsay’s case, Nationwide admitted that it could have done more.

“When she notified us of the scam she was advised

that she had authorised the payments and Nationwide was not liable for her loss,” it said.

“However, on review of the case we believe we could have been more forceful in advising her not to make the next payment and have therefore refunded her £50,000 – the money she sent after our intervention.”

The banking industry Payment Systems Regulator has ordered the six biggest banks to implement a “confirmation of payee” process by the end of March, meaning that the name on an account receiving money must be checked against the name given by the person paying.