Why DID it take the MoS to step in for Santander to pay Jean back the £30,300 she lost to a wickedly devious fraud?
WHY should it often take the intervention of the press to get financial justice for consumers? It’s a question I regularly ask myself – although I can’t deny I thoroughly enjoy the moment whenever a mighty financial services company caves in, usually for fear of getting a pasting in the personal finance pages of The Mail on Sunday. It makes me feel good and vindicates my profession. For example, over the years I’ve managed to get many insurance giants to review claims they had originally rejected and pay out huge sums as a result.
Invariably, the policies were bought to provide financial protection at a time when it is most needed – when a household is struck by long-term illness or a life- threatening health condition. To have a claim rejected against such a scary backdrop can be deeply unsettling, especially when the reason given is a spurious one based on disputed medical evidence or t he nondisclosure of a medical issue many moons ago.
Thankfully, our interventions have often righted these wrongs.
It has happened again in recent days, albeit in a different area of the financial services industry. Recently, I’ve been looking at some of the scams that have caught out a number of readers. Scams committed by fraudsters which have resulted in devastating financial losses for those targeted. They came to my attention because of an article I wrote last month on investment cloning – in which a fraudster copies the details of a legitimate financial services firm and then persuades investors to make investments through the fraudulent website. The money invested is never seen again.
Jean Timmins, a lovely 72-year-old retired secondary school teacher from Wolverhampton, was one of those who contacted me – egged on by her neighbour Phil Haden, a financial adviser whom I have known for a while. Since the end of last year, she had been battling with her bank (Santander) over two payments she made to scammers totalling £30,300.
ONLY our intervention got her the money back. Why? Let’s go back to the start. Last September, like many people, Jean was looking for a better return on her cash savings. National Savings & Investments, her savings port of call, had just slashed its rates, so she started to hunt on the internet for better alternatives.
She came across a company called Redmaine Cooper Price offering what looked like attractive bonds. Everything seemed normal – the company had a London address and an authorisation number from the City regulator. She completed a form online and then received a call from someone called John Watts who said that there was a bond available (UK Treasury 6 per cent) that might interest her.
‘He was very professional,’ says Jean. ‘He emailed details about the bond, i ncluding when i nterest would be paid [bi-annually] and the date the bond matured [December 2028]. Given it was a Government bond, I couldn’t see how it could go wrong. In order to invest, he said I would have to send copies of my passport photo identification, which I duly did.’
Emails from Watts referred to his 15 years of experience ‘working in UK bond markets’. They also quoted a regulator’s authorisation number and referred her to the regulator’s list of approved companies. These details appeared to confirm that RCP was an authorised company.
Maybe it was the next bit that should have raised a few alarms in Jean’s mind. ‘He said there may be a problem with my bank Santander releasing the money,’ she recollects. ‘ He said Santander would prefer me to buy its own products – and he advised me, if questioned by the bank, to say the money I was investing was to buy goods, not bonds.’
She duly invested £10,300 and, although challenged by Santander, the payment (to RGS Clearing Limited) went through. Susan Clarke, in administration at Redmaine Cooper Price, confirmed receipt of the money and gave Jean details of how she could track her investment online.
Later the same month (October), John Watts phoned again to say he had another bond that might interest her – this time with Lloyds, a company he said was safe as the bank was still part Government owned. It was a lie – the Government divested its stake in Lloyds nearly four years ago. After being told the bond had a coupon of 9.625 per cent and paid annual interest until April 2023, Jean was hooked and sold a cash Isa so that she could invest £20,000 in the bond. Again, Santander queried the transfer, but allowed the payment through.
It was in December, when she could no l onger l og i n to her account, that she became suspicious. She rang the regulator’s helpline and was advised to contact her bank. Unbeknown to Jean, only weeks earlier, the Financial Con
duct Authority had issued a warning about Redmaine Cooper Price, stating it had cloned the details of a French-based company called RCP, authorised to sell financial products in the UK.
In other words, John Watts, Susan Clarke and Chris Moore (allegedly Redmaine Cooper Price’s compliance officer) were scam mers. Last month, after investigating the scam, Santander wrote to Jean, telling her that it would not be reimbursing her losses. It had assessed her case against the voluntary ‘contingent reimbursement model’ code for authorised push payment scams – and had concluded she had not taken the care ‘that was expected’. Push payments are where people are persuaded to make realtime payments to fraudsters.
She was furious. ‘What more could I have done?’ she asks. ‘I had phoned the FCA to check the company’s authorisation. I had phoned the company (RCP), only to be told everyone was working from home because of Covid. And I assumed Santander had done its own checking when querying the two payments.’
Not happy, she said she would take her complaint to t he Financial Ombudsman Service.
Earlier this month, she mentioned the scam in passing to a neighbour – Phil Haden, a chartered financial planner with Prosperity Wealth. Having exchanged a few emails over the years, he asked me to take a look. I promptly contacted Santander.
After a couple of days, it responded to say that it was overturning its original decision to decline Jean’s claim. It said no blame could be attributed to her.
It said: ‘Having reviewed Mrs Timmins’ claim, we will be refunding £30,300 to her under the CRM code’s “no blame” scenario. Both of Mrs Timmins’ payments were stopped by our fraud prevention systems while we had conversations with her, warning her to perform further checks on Redmaine Cooper Price, including confirming its legitimacy with the FCA.
‘Mrs Timmins has confirmed that she called the FCA before making the first payment, and we believe in this instance that she reasonably felt she had carried out suitable checks before making the transfer.’ Upon hearing the news, Jean’s response was joyous. In an email to me a few days ago, she said: ‘I was totally overwhelmed when, yesterday evening, I heard Santander would be refunding the whole of the monies to me. I cannot thank you enough for doing this and I am very grateful. ‘I also hope that in highlighting my case, you may help unsuspecting people avoid falling victim to these disgusting scams.’ So, a great result in the end. But it begs the question: how many Jeans are out there who have been victims of scams and have been left high and dry by their bank? Too many, I fear. The quicker the banks are required to give better protection to the likes of Jean (see box above), the better.