Who Said Crime Doesn’t Pay?

This is a heavily truncated description of a sequence of events that began a year ago. The full story would fill many blogs, and it is long enough as it is. I have not mentioned the name of the company involved (which has ceased trading anyway), nor its directors in case this may affect any ongoing investigations by the police, although I am not sure that there are any ongoing investigations.

In February 2019 my mother-in-law was scammed out of over £6,000 and the efforts that my wife went through trying to recover that money, and the inefficiency and total inaction on the part of the people that you would think would want to pursue the people who did this, leads me to the inescapable conclusion that in this case, crime - specifically fraud - does pay.

We only discovered that £6,000 had gone missing from my mother-in-law’s bank account when we decided that we really had to deal with the tsunami of paperwork that was all over her living room floor. Our principal concern was that hidden among the mountains of paper was some crucial bill that had not been paid. As it turned out, I did find a cheque that was three years old and hadn’t been paid into her bank account; fortunately getting a replacement turned out to be relatively straightforward.

Having gone through the piles of utility bills and sundry other correspondence, I sorted about four years’ worth of bank statements into date order and started plodding through them in case there was anything dubious. I didn’t expect to find anything but then I came across a debit for £6,100 for a cheque that had been issued.

As luck would have it, I almost immediately came across a Customer Purchase Order, which was for the supposed installation of some loft insulation. This document showed that this was what my mother-in-law had issued the cheque for.

We managed to piece together a few facts, as although Val’s mum could not remember the men to whom she gave the cheque calling, her neighbour did remember them coming and being quite aggressive; she told them to leave, but it seems that they returned and that was when they got the cheque. Of course, we checked the loft; no work had been done – there had never been any intention on the fraudster’s part to do any – and it looked as though no one had been in the loft for decades.

What happened next is a long, depressing story of the frustration that comes dealing with the agencies that you would hope and believe should be there to help people who have been the victims of this sort of thing. It is fortunate that Val and I have the time, the patience – and after a couple of lifetimes working in environments where one has to deal with bureaucracy – the wherewithal of going through the steps to try and recover the money. I am sure that a lot of victims of this sort of crime simply give up and write the money off.

Our first port of call was the local police station, except they don’t accept visitors except by appointment, so we phoned 101, the police non-emergency number. Some seventy-minutes later, when we finally spoke to someone, we were told to contact Action Fraud. We had tried phoning the company, but both of their phone numbers went straight to voicemail. We reported the matter to Action Fraud; to this day, we have not heard anything from them and contacting them for updates is completely pointless. Similarly, Trading Standards are of no help whatever, as we reported the matter to them through the Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) and have never heard a peep since, and according to the CAB, Trading Standards do not – as a matter of policy – update them, nor complainants, on any progress that they may make. We eventually did get confirmation – through the county council, and thanks only to the assistance of my mother-in-law’s Member of Parliament - that the matter had been filed unactioned by Trading Standards.

Naturally, we tried writing to the company asking them to refund the £6,100 and we also contacted my mother-in-law’s bankers and requested a copy of the paid cheque. Both the Royal Mail and Barclays Bank performed – or should I say, failed to perform – these tasks with breath-taking levels of incompetence.

The Royal Mail delivered our Recorded Delivery letter back to us instead of to the addressee, and when they resent it and had it refused at the address, promptly lost it for a number of weeks. It has to be said that our writing this and subsequent letters were just us going through the motions, we actually delivered letters in person, but as the company’s address was at a self-storage unit, it is improbable that anyone from the company ever saw them.

It took innumerable phone calls and letters to get a copy of the paid cheque from the bank – in the end, we had to raise a formal complaint – and when we finally got it, showed that although my mother-in-law had signed the cheque, had been completed by one of the men who scammed her.

We did make contact with the police again and eventually made it to the police station where we spent three hours giving a statement. That was in September 2019; we’ve heard nothing since.

We instructed solicitors to try and recover the funds, albeit that we were reluctant to throw good money after bad, and they had no more success in contacting the company or its directors than we did.

There is a happy ending to this story, for us at least, although other similar victims may not have been as lucky. In an act of desperation, we wrote to the bank at the suggestion of a social worker and suggested that my mother-in-law may have been a victim of an authorised push payment fraud (APP), although these are more normally associated with bank transfers than cheques.

The bank then phoned us and took some more details and decided that, without any admission of liability on their part, that they would credit Val’s mum’s account with the full amount of the cheque, plus £150 for the less than efficient way they had dealt with our request for the copy of the paid cheque. This they said, was in recognition of the lengths to which we had gone in trying to recover the money ourselves.

While this ended happily for us inasmuch that we did get the bulk of the money back (there were some solicitors fees that we obviously did not recover), a lot of people in similar circumstances would not have been so fortunate.

Investigations at Companies House (their website is a mine of information), showed that the directors of the company that scammed my mother-in-law have set up and dissolved a good number of companies in recent years, companies that I imagine they set up with the express purpose of committing similar frauds.

Action Fraud were worse than useless in this matter, although having seen the expose that The Times ran on them, this is scarcely surprising, as it seems that by and large, they do little more than record incidents of fraud that the public report to them, and collate the information. Cases that are passed on to the police seem to have a limited chance of being investigated, let alone being resolved. The Times reports that a review conducted by former Metropolitan Police deputy commissioner Sir Craig Mackay showed that only one in 200 officers were dedicated to investigating fraud even though there were nearly four million incidents per year in England and Wales, which is more than one in three of all crimes.

The report said that fraudsters were able to ‘operate with impunity’ and that millions of victims were being failed as cases were being handed to ‘unskilled investigators’ and that the police could ‘no longer work effectively to identify criminals and help bring them to justice.’ That definitely tallies with our experience.

We did contact my mother-in-law’s MP, although there is little that he could do, even as a member of the party that tags itself ‘the party of law and order.’ He said he would write to the Home Secretary, Priti Patel about the matter, or at least the general principle. If he did, she doesn’t appear to have responded. Her boast at last October’s Tory party conference that the government was "coming after the thugs, gangs, and criminals who make law-abiding people's lives a misery" rings pretty hollow, I’m afraid.

Priti Patel 

Bizarrely, we received a letter from Brandon Lewis in his capacity as Minister of State for Security and Deputy for Eu Exit and No Deal Preparation: your guess is as good as mine as to how Brexit connects with the fraud against my mother-in-law. The letter says that Mr Lewis was sorry to hear about the fraud, but then rambles on for several paragraphs generalising about the government’s response to fraud, but stating that although Action Fraud did pass the information on to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau, they decided not to pass it on to the police and that Trading Standards were the people through whom a claim against the fraudsters should be pursued. As we know, Trading Standards filed the matter unactioned.

The conclusion that I have reached is that if you are a fraudster, or plan to be one, your chances of getting caught are slim; if you are a victim, you are pretty much on your own. In this case, and no doubt in many more besides, the agencies that one expects to help – Action Fraud, the police, Trading Standards – take the information and simply file it unactioned.  Since there is no point in relying on them, then it is clearly essential to be careful and avoid being scammed, but if you are old and vulnerable, that may be easier said than done.