A bad year for conmen

By THIS IS MONEY
Updated:

 

CROOKS and conmen have kept Financial Mail's Readers' Champion Tony Hetherington especially busy in 2002.

Shady offshore stockbrokers have been a recurring theme. These firms phone up British investors selling them overpriced shares in questionable companies.

Union Partners, based in Barcelona, belonged to a web of stockbroking firms with connections in the UK and Grenada, West Indies.

After repeated warnings in Financial Mail about people linked to these firms, the Serious Fraud Office raided several addresses in July. But, as we warned in October and December, some of those connected to the firms have new companies up and running.

Other brokers under fire include Hoffman Philips and Walker Stone, both also based in Spain.

Hetherington has also warned repeatedly about Ingennex, a glorified pyramid selling scheme. He wrote in February: 'This firm will never survive.'

He was right. The Department of Trade & Industry had it wound up in November.

In October, Hetherington warned about Your Private Gold Mine, supposedly a money- creating scheme based on information found in ancient Egyptian scrolls.

In reality, it was a chain-mail operation where success depended on 100,000 people replying to your letter.

The couple behind the scam are well known to Financial Mail - convicted fraudsters Robert and Pauline Chambers from Buckfastleigh, Devon. Their ventures included selling an idea to get rich by putting a photograph of yourself in a doll's hand and splashing it with holy water.

Details of Your Private Goldmine were passed to the police and to officials at the Office of Fair Trading.

The DTI belatedly acted against another 'regular', James Hewitt Associates. Financial Mail first spotlighted this firm's bogus wine investment offers last December and it was finally closed by the courts this autumn.

Hetherington has also helped dozens of readers reclaim what is rightly theirs in the face of incompetence, sluggish processes or bureaucracy.

In May, for example, a pensioner lost £1,200 when a holiday company went bust.

He had paid for the trip with a NatWest credit card, but the bank was reluctant to accept its duty of joint liability. Then Hetherington became involved and the cash was refunded.

In a similar case in September, he secured a £4,364 refund from Bank of Scotland. And Hetherington arranged for a £7,000 refund from West Bromwich building society for another investor after a misunderstanding led to his cash being put into shares instead of a deposit account.

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