Fake football websites trick parents into buying bogus Premier League trials for children
A CONMAN posed as executives at two Premier League football clubs to swindle parents of aspiring young footballers out of thousands of pounds, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.
The elaborate fraud involved setting up bogus websites and email addresses to make parents believe they could buy their children a place at sporting academies linked to Liverpool and Newcastle football clubs. Under the name of Egzy Gomez Jr, the conman posed as bosses at the two academies to offer nonexistent trials to young players.
Parents in the UK and the US were asked to pay £500 to secure trials to try to join the clubs’ academies. Lawyers for both clubs have obtained the right to seize the fraudster’s websites.
The man, understood to be from Birmingham, has been reported to police and is currently under investigation by
Trading Standards officers. Two separate judgments by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), a UN organisation that rules on tradename breaches, stripped Gomez of the domain names NewcastleUnitedAcademy.com and LiverpoolFootballClubAcademy.com and email addresses linked to each site.
The rulings show how the two websites, set up in April and May last year, used the club’s trademark names to “offer children the opportunity of a non-existent football trial in return for £500 to a fictitious third party ‘agent’ by using an email address using the disputed domain name and impersonating” executives at the clubs’ academies.
The judgments explain how he used the website, which featured each club’s merchandise, and emails “for fraud by falsely representing himself as a senior member” of the two clubs.
The conman, who used a fake name of Egzy Gomez Jr when registering the sites and whose real identity has not been revealed in legal papers, was found to have “deliberately appropriated” names confusingly similar to both clubs in one of the most “egregious examples” of someone impersonating executives at a football club to make money.
He even contacted other football clubs and universities in America in the hope of persuading them to apply.
When the man was contacted by
WIPO, a “third party” replied saying: “Alls [sic] I know is that I legally bought an email domain … I have not done anything wrong so whatever complaint was filled [sic] against me is not for me so you must have got the wrong guy.”
A Birmingham City Council spokesman said: “There is an ongoing investigation into this matter and under the Enterprise Act we are unable to give any details on such investigations.”
Both clubs declined to comment.