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A FURNITURE company boss who targeted elderly and disabled customers with promises of specially made chairs and beds is facing a possible prison sentence after being convicted on 31 counts of fraud and unfair trading.
David Waters, 71, from Felixstowe, Suffolk, was the sole director of Anchor Mobility Limited. He pocketed large deposits for what were said to be made-to-measure items, but then failed to deliver them or to repay the money. One customer paid more than £8,000 for two beds which were never delivered, and they received no refund.
Waters will be sentenced on December 19. When the jury announced its verdicts at Ipswich Crown Court, Judge Emma Peters told Waters: ‘I am very much considering sending you to prison. You dealt with elderly, vulnerable and in some cases disabled people, and you frankly swindled tens of thousands of pounds from them.’
And Waters is a repeat offender. In 2013, he and his son Oliver were fined after they pleaded guilty to using aggressive and misleading sales tactics, with salesmen falsely claiming that their then company
Mobility UK was linked to health insurer Bupa. In a separate case in 2015, David Waters’ next company, Westminster Recliners Limited, pleaded guilty to fresh charges of breaching consumer protection laws.
I sounded the alarm twice in 2016 over Waters and his companies, and revealed that he had just set up Anchor Mobility as his latest business.
Suffolk County Council’s Trading Standards Department began enquiries, and lead investigator Stuart Hughes said at the close of the trial: ‘Anchor Mobility Limited and David Waters owed their customers a special duty of care, but instead caused vulnerable people great stress, anger and financial loss that they could ill afford.’