A Lombard St address, a smart website... and £2,500 up in smoke
G.P. writes: I was cold-called by Parker Stone Capital, based in Lombard Street, London. I was given a Financial Conduct Authority registration number of 700154, belonging to Philip Stone. The firm proposed an investment in ‘debt portfolio’, with a 10 per cent return. I carried out due diligence and all seemed fine, so I invested £2,500, though it pressed for more. I received interest for two months, but nothing more, and emails and phone calls went unanswered. I realised I had been scammed and I informed my bank and the police. My £2,500 went into an account with Nationwide Building Society.
AS YOU now know, Parker Stone Capital is bogus. It claims to have been in business for almost ten years, but its address in the City is short-let offices and its phone line has gone dead.
The website describes investment manager Pela Inera as follows: ‘She joined Parker Stone Capital in 2012, having previously been a senior investment manager at a multistrategy fund of hedge funds, with responsibilities across a range of strategies.’
It all sounds authentic and it is – but not for Pela Inera, who appears not even to exist.
The entire description has been lifted from the website of the genuine investment company Towry, part of the Tilney Group, and is about its genuine investment manager Pela Strataki.
Other figures are equally fake. The picture of portfolio manager ‘Sebastian Gray’ is actually a photograph of Jeff Reed, who works for a recruitment agency in South Africa.
Chief executive ‘Kennith Griffin’ is really Michael Hofer, a manage- ment figure in under-21 football in Germany.
More seriously though, Philip Stone is genuine and so is his regulator’s registration number. He is an insolvency consultant based in Newhaven, East Sussex. He told me: ‘We deal solely with business debts, mainly tax debts.’
He has no connection to Parker Stone Capital and added: ‘I had not heard of this and I am not happy about it.
‘The internet can be terrifying. It’s far too easy to do things like this. I had better get on to the regulator. We do not deal with investments on any level.’
Like Philip Stone, the NationwideN account thatth accepted your investmentinv is also genuine – or rather, it was. The building society told me it became suspicious when what was a basic bank account suddenly received a large credit. It made enquiries and an official explained: ‘The society still wasn’t satisfied so we refused to allow further withdrawals.’ Nationwide returned the balance to the bank that sent it and then closed the account.
Nationwide’s advice is: ‘Reject any cold-call, email or text around an unexpected investment opportunity.’
Good advice, of course, but the problem is you thought you were dealing with an authorised adviser. Someone opened the Nationwide account and produced evidence of their identity, so is it too much to hope for that the Fraud Squad might investigate?