You smelled a rat in ‘claims firm’ that promised fortune
J.R. writes: Consumer campaigner Martin Lewis gave me your contact details, saying you are the person to expose what happened to me. A flaw in the banking system could have cost me my house and ended in bankruptcy.
WHAT happened to you was a particularly clever fraud. You were contacted by a claims management firm about a possible payment protection insurance refund. You were then told that you were not entitled to compensation, but by happy chance, the firm had spotted that you had been overcharged on your mortgage to the tune of £18,000. The claims firm would recover the money for you for a fee of £4,800.
So far, so good. The firm’s accountant set up a conference call to you and your bank, NatWest. You went through the usual security questions with the bank and agreed that the accountant could speak on your behalf. Then you were cut off. You began to panic, realising you had given a stranger access to your account. You went online and moved your money out. However, when you checked next morning, your money had not been touched. And there was £18,000 in your account that had not been there the day before.
Immediately, the claims firm was on the phone, asking you to transfer the £4,800 fee to its bank. Again, you got cold feet. You refused to pay, saying you wanted to speak to the police in case something was not right. And despite a flurry of phone calls demanding money, you did not pay. Then everything went quiet – until recently, when the Chelsea Building Society rang to ask why your mortgage was £18,000 in arrears, and that you were about to face repossession proceedings.
What happened after you were cut off from the conference call was that the so-called accountant had told NatWest that your mortgage payments were incorrect, and under the Direct Debit Guarantee scheme, it was up to NatWest to put the contested £18,000 back into your account, and then reclaim the money from the building society.
Of course, it would have taken days or even weeks for NatWest to realise this was a scam. Meanwhile, the plan was that you would have paid the £4,800 fee, and only later discovered the huge mortgage arrears.
In case anyone thinks you are daft for falling for this, let me add that you believed you were dealing with Financial Claims Made Simple. This is a genuine claims management firm, based in Bristol and fully licensed by the Ministry of Justice. Crooks had registered a bogus i nternet address in the same name except for a tiny difference in punctuation. The emails and documents you were sent had been copied from the real firm’s own website and even carried the genuine firm’s address and phone number.
The copycat was registered to an address in Pennsylvania in the US, and if you had sent the £4,800 by bank transfer, it would have ended up in an account in Frankfurt in Germany.
Karl Griffin, of the real Financial Claims Made Simple, told me his company was unaware of the fraud until I made contact. He added: ‘We deplore any such activity, particularly when the fraudsters seek to take advantage of our excellent reputation to disinhibit their targets.’
You will not have been the only victim or intended victim. The bad guys have not gone to all this trouble for just £4,800, so I expect some people have lost heavily. Well done for smelling a rat.