Article by Mhairi
As always, we try to provide helpful money advisor scam updates whenever we can to try to help you stay safe.
The latest warning is to be very careful when scanning QR codes. Personally, I find them too annoying to use, but millions find them easy to use. Be particularly aware when scanning codes in public places like car parks. Fraudsters have taken to placing their own scam QR codes over official ones. So please check if there are any stickers attached. If there are, be wary. Also try to check that the destination URL of your code looks right. Scammers tend to use URLs with lots of symbols, also check for poor grammar. A URL is the web page address as it appears in your search bar. For example, https://ccfps.co.uk/. The part to look for here is the ccfps part which is our company name. It would be easy to misread this if it was say ccpfs, which is why you have to be careful and vigilant.
FCA are helpful to money advisors.
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is working hard to try to prevent scam and/or misleading adverts circulating on social media. In the last 3 months they have cracked down on over 3,200 adverts and financial promotions. That’s twice as many as the same period last year. 39 firms were involved in interventions. The promotions involved were for lending offers 66%, investments 23%, banking 5% and pensions 3%.
Over 500 alerts were issued by the FCA covering unauthorised firms. But it’s not clear how the public find out about these alerts. 10% of the alerts were concerned with cloning. That’s where scammers pretend to be an authorised firm. Often, they have e mails with similar names, which is why you should always carefully check any URLs to make sure they are the correct firms.
Unsurprisingly the FCA also found issues with a number of crypto firms. The main issues were around adverts not containing the correct helpful money advisor warnings about investment risk and cooling off periods.
The FCA have also recently fined Forex TB Limited over £250,000 for providing investment advice to customers without having the authorisation to provide advice. This goes back to 2021, but at least action has now been taken. The advice was around complex contracts for difference and involved professional clients.
FOS and the FSCS
Elsewhere, the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) is now looking at investments into the company Central Markets Investment Management who offered investments into property in Cape Verde. The company has gone into administration, but you should always be wary of overseas investments.
Meanwhile, the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) has cut its average processing time to 12 weeks. That’s a 50% improvement on the previous 12 months. This is the average time taken for a claim to be first assessed right through to FOS making a decision on the complaint. It also increased the number of claims being processed by 80%. A lot of the improvements are down to digital improvements. Things may improve further if they introduce fees for Claims Company’s to present cases to them, which is being proposed.
Claims Company’s and Solicitors
Finally, the Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA) have stepped in to put a cap on the amount solicitors can charge customers. The cap has now been set at 30% of any compensation award. That brings solicitors in line with Claims Management Companies (CMC’s) who are regulated by the FCA. Previously solicitors had been able to charge whatever they wanted. And some of them did. AMK Legal who have been advertising for claims against giant advice firm St James Place have been charging customers an eye watering 48% of the compensation they received.
The new cap is actually on a sliding scale. A maximum 30% for compensation under £1499, a maximum 28% for compensation between £1500 and £9,999, reducing all the way down to a 15% cap on compensation of over £50,000. Much fairer. But it only applies to new claims.
On a lighter note, the FCA is also cracking down on firms who hold permissions to transact regulated advice, but who haven’t done any regulated business for a while. The FCA wants to make sure regulated firms are up to date with all the latest regulations. As part of the crackdown Premier League football club Wolverhampton wanderers have had their permissions removed.
