Invasion of the website clones

One of the most devious tactics used by crooks targeting your money is to pass themselves off as a long-established company.

They clone the details of respected businesses and some pay search engines to ensure their fake websites come even higher up search results than the real thing.

The tragic results are that victims can lose their life savings to crooks who are likely to prove impossible to trace.

Dealing with a company called Regent Capital plc seemed completely safe because it was regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.

The retired reader, who I’ll just call by his first name, Roy, was told that Regent Capital had discovered an old investment in his name, worth around £33,000.

It seemed plausible because Roy had dabbled in shares and it is possible to lose track of holdings as companies merge or get taken over.

To get hold of his investment Roy was informed that he needed to pay a “capital exchange procedure fee” that amounted to £3,648.

But since that payment last July, callers have come up with reason after reason why he can’t have his money until he pays for more supposed costs such as capital gains tax, escrow services fees and “international screening”.

The callers assured Roy that not only was his investment increasing in value, most of his payments were refundable.

Roy, who is 80 and has suffered a stroke, kept on paying until he ran out of money. He then told his son Simon what had happened.

By that time Roy and his wife had

made 56 separate payments from their Lloyds Bank accounts coming to more than £160,000.

The phone numbers, email and web addresses given to Roy, regentcapitalholdings.co.uk and rch-ltd.com, had no connection with the genuine Regent Capital.

“Whether my parents ever see their money again or not, what this has done to them on a physical and mental health level is awful, and I am incredibly angry that this has happened to them,” Simon told me.

Some of that anger is reserved for Lloyds, who Simon believes could have done more to protect their vulnerable customer.

He said the scammers coached his

father to say that the withdrawals were for home improvements, should the bank enquire, and on the five or six occasions that it did ask, this answer was accepted and the payments were put through.

A Lloyds spokesman said the bank had a great deal of sympathy for Roy, adding: “We are urgently reviewing the details of this case and will update him as soon as our investigations have concluded.”

The genuine Regent Capital has been fighting scammers hijacking its name for 10 months now.

“It is definitely distressing to get a call from a victim or a relative about this, though it can be positive if they haven’t yet paid and I’m able to say don’t do anything, this is a fraud,” said Regent Capital’s chief executive

Virginia Beckett. “I’ve had 30 or 40 people come to me, but that will be the tip of the iceberg.”

She repeatedly contacted Action Fraud, on behalf of victims who struggled to use the online reporting system, and also requested that domain providers and telecoms companies take down fake sites and phone numbers.

New sites with new numbers keep springing up but that does not make it a pointless exercise.

“It does mean that if someone tried to get hold of them on a number or website they’d previously been given and it was no longer working then they might track us down via Companies House, allowing us to tell them it’s a fraud,” Ms Beckett said.

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What this has done to them on a physical and mental level is awful