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Frauds, Scams & Cons (General; Miscellaneous)

garrick92 said:
Couple sentenced for selling 'Madeleine McCann detectors'.

Quite, quite bizarre. People believe all sorts of weird shit, but this takes the biscuit. Did the 'inventors' actually believe their own claims? I suppose the Court must have found that they didn't, or they wouldn't have had the necessary 'guilty mind' for conviction.
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So why aren't "psychics" who seek to help the police or families of missing peopkle arrested and charged?
 
garrick92 said:
Couple sentenced for selling 'Madeleine McCann detectors'.

Quite, quite bizarre. People believe all sorts of weird shit, but this takes the biscuit.
Click to expand...
The BBC report (also today) on fake bomb detectors links several groups trying similar scams.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-29477894
More here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-29459896
The fraudsters and their devices

The ADE-651 (supposedly shorthand for Advanced Detection Equipment) was sold to Iraq, Niger and other Middle Eastern countries by Somerset-based businessman, James McCormick, who is now serving 10 years in jail. The Iraqis spent £53m ($85m) on the devices at around £5,000 ($8,034) a time. Some sold for as much as £25,000 ($40,178).

The GT200 "remote substance detector", sold by Gary Bolton mainly in Mexico, Thailand, the Middle East and Africa. The device retailed at £5,000 ($8,034) but the highest price it achieved was £500,000 ($803,000). Bolton was sentenced to seven years.

The Alpha 6 manufactured by Samuel and Joan Tree and sold to Egypt, Thailand and Mexico, usually at £2,000 ($3,213) per device. The highest sale price was £15,500 ($24,906) Tree was given three and a half years behind bars while his wife was ordered to do 300 hours unpaid community work.
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I think the James McCormick case was already reported on this MB.
 
A mother has admitted defrauding friends and kind-hearted strangers out of thousands of pounds by claiming that she had terminal cancer.

Danielle Watson, 24, said she had late-stage cervical cancer from January 2012 to claim donations, freebies, and cut-price deals for her upcoming wedding worth almost £10,000 (€12,600).

The then 21-year-old admin assistant even brought forward her wedding by several months to April that year so she could walk up the aisle before radiotherapy and chemo made her hair fall out.

In fact, she had had minor surgery for a treatable gynaecological condition and had never been diagnosed with, or treated for, cancer.

She aroused suspicions by failing to provide proof of her illness and demanding all donations be paid to her account.

She then revealed in June 2012 that she was pregnant.

She had denied six counts of fraud but dramatically changed her pleas on the first day of her trial at Basildon Crown Court, sitting in Southend, Essex. ...

http://www.irishexaminer.com/world/moth ... 92252.html
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Prior to the successful prisoner swap that freed US Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl from Taliban control in May, the Pentagon was swindled out of a ransom payment in an attempt to win back the kidnapped American soldier, US officials said.

The covert payment made by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) was stolen by an Afghan middleman who claimed to be working with the Haqqani network on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, according to Rep. Duncan Hunter. The ransom was first revealed by Hunter in a Nov. 5 letter to US Department of Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, according to The Washington Times.

“Given the significance of this matter, as well as the fact that Pentagon officials have denied that a payment was even considered — and you also said you were unaware of any such attempt — I ask you to immediately inquire with JSOC to determine the specific order of events,” wrote Hunter, a Republican member of the House Armed Services Committee. ...

http://rt.com/usa/207399-pentagon-ranso ... -bergdahl/
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Quite the little industry.

Phone scammers 'net £23.9m in a year'

The amount of money lost to phone scammers has tripled in a year, prompting a major awareness campaign.

An estimated £23.9m has been tricked out of unsuspecting victims in the last year, up from £7m the previous year, according to Financial Fraud Action.

The group, which runs fraud prevention action for the financial services industry, said research suggested 58% of people had received suspect calls.

This was up from 41% in a similar study carried out last summer.

The main trick involves a con artist deceiving victims into believing they are calling from the police, a bank or a computer company.

They suggest that the individual has been the victim of fraud and ask for personal financial information - such as card details or a Pin code - to access their account.

Some ask victims to transfer money, to withdraw cash from a branch, or to hand over a bank card to a courier.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-30279582
 
dreeness . said:
"Grapho - Therapy"

Christ.

:confused:

Click to expand...

What’s your angle? Graphology psychology. | Yankee Skeptic

Excerpt:
The Schweidland chart is used in the article to study President Abraham Lincoln’s signature and also that of President George Washington. Amazingly these presidents signatures reflect what most of us already know about them.

(The below is from the “Weekly Stokes Newsletter”, put out by HandwritingUniversity.com, which offers courses so you too can become a graphologist. A keyboardologist would be my personal recommendation for a career, and I’m sure there will be online classes for that soon.)

An emotional slant like that can also lead to impulsiveness… remember the story of the cherry tree??When he was a small boy, George got a hatchet for his birthday. He impulsively cut down a small cherry tree to try the hatchet out! The story goes that his father was angry with him and although he was afraid, he told his father the truth, that yes, he did cut down the cherry tree; and his father was proud that he told the truth.

The story of George Washington and the cherry tree was debunked well before I went to elementary school in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Parson Weems, in his 1800 biography of George Washington made the myth of the honest young George who just couldn’t resist the impulse to chop down a cherry tree popular(well just look at his handwriting slant).
 
A fake bank which was set up to look just like a real one has swindled Chinese savers out of 200m yuan ($32m; £21m), it's reported.

To customers in the eastern city of Nanjing the interior looked like any other state-owned bank, with uniformed clerks working behind the counters, the Southern Metropolis Daily website reports. Almost 200 people deposited their cash, including a businessman who handed over 12m yuan ($1.9m; £1.3m) in 2014. But he grew suspicious when he wasn't paid the promised interest on his money, and went to the police after the bank refused to return his savings. A police investigation found that it was actually a rural cooperative, which had none of the accreditations required to operate as a bank. It had been promising interest rates of 2% per week and high interest subsidies, police say. ...

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-30932424
 
I wrote, in this thread, in Octopber 2011:
This type of story crops up so often that I'm beginning to think of them as "Andy Pipkin Frauds" after the character in Little Britain's Lou and Andy sketches:

Benefit cheat Jake Preston filmed in motocross race win

A benefit cheat who claimed he could not walk was secretly filmed racing to victory in a British motocross competition.
Jake Preston, 20, claimed he had a condition called syringomyelia, causing him severe pain in his neck and spine, Bolton magistrates heard.
....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-ma ... r-15308726

Now the press are into the Lou and Andy meme:
CCTV: 'Little Britain' thieves caught on camera

This is the moment a pair of 'Little Britain' thieves were caught on camera after one of them jumped up from a wheelchair and started stealing from a shop

[Video]

By Leon Watson and Telegraph Video, video source West Midlands Police

10:24AM GMT 27 Jan 2015

This is the moment a pair of "Little Britain" thieves were caught on camera after one of them jumped up from a wheelchair and started stealing from a shop.
The real-life Andy and Lou were captured on CCTV entering a Marks & Spencer store at around 5pm on January 11.
A man in a purple hoodie can be seen pushing a woman in a beige coat and jeans before she miraculously seems to recover the use of her legs.
In scenes reminiscent of the hit BBC comedy show she suddenly stands up in the style of character Andy "I want that one" Pipkin before stuffing items into her coat.
Her accomplice was also spotted loading stolen goods into the woman's rucksack as he pushed her around the store in Coventry, West Midlands.

etc...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukn...-Little-Britain-thieves-caught-on-camera.html

Life imitating art! :)
 
A high class conwoman.

Pretty, fashionably tattooed and possessed of a dazzling smile, Belle Gibson looks as if she has it all. But the 26-year-old also had cancer of the blood, spleen, brain, uterus and liver.

She became a media star, online and old school, in Australia in 2013 when she told of her recovery by cutting gluten and dairy from her diet and having oxygen therapy, colonic irrigation and traditional Indian Ayurvedic medicine, after radiotherapy and chemotherapy had failed to help.

Based on her experiences, Gibson launched a health, wellness and lifestyle app, the Whole Pantry, which has been downloaded more than 300,000 times, for three Australian dollars and 79 cents – about €2.75 – a time. It was so successful that Apple flew her to California for the launch of the Apple Watch, and included the app in its demo. ...

The first sign that all was not quite as it seemed came when the Age newspaper, in Melbourne, revealed that money promised to various charities had not arrived. ...

In better news, it has emerged that she does not have cancer of the liver, uterus, spleen or blood. ...

A former employee said she did not believe Gibson’s cancer story. “She would post on social media that she’d been at a doctor’s appointment all day, but really she was just going to the dentist . . . She got her veneers done. She would make it sound like it was for cancer-related illness.” ...

Now Gibson may face criminal charges, as neither she nor her businesses are legally registered as fundraisers. It also turns out that Gibson is not 26; she’s 23. But lying about her age is the least of her troubles.

http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-...f-belle-gibson-1.2147035#.VQ2nW5shmpU.twitter
 
And she admits it.

An Australian "wellness" blogger who built a successful business on claims she survived terminal cancer has admitted she never had the disease.

"None of it's true", Belle Gibson told Australia's Women's Weekly magazine in an interview.

Ms Gibson chronicled her battle with cancer on a blog, The Whole Pantry, which spawned an app and recipe book But doubts about her claims surfaced after she failed to deliver a promised $300,000 donation to charity.

"I am still jumping between what I think I know and what is reality," Ms Gibson said in the interview, her first since the story was called into question. "I have lived it and I'm not really there yet," she said. ...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-32420070
 
A Chinese man who was caught cheating on 17 girlfriends at once has been arrested for fraud.

The man from Hunan province made headlines last month when all 17 women discovered each other when they rushed to his hospital bedside. The allegation of fraud relates to sums of money which he regularly took from the deceived women, according to the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

The women set up an online chat group called "revenge alliance", SCMP said. It was on this chat group that they discovered he would ask some of his girlfriends for money every month, the paper said. ...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-32796941
 
I posted the first notice of this in Strange Deaths but it now looks as if it was suicide.

The many lives and strange death of an Irish conwoman
Bodies of Cecilia McKitterick and ‘husband’ Tom Ruttle were found in Limerick this week

Tom Ruttle is to be buried in his family’s plot in Boolaglass, the townland near Askeaton, in Co Limerick, where he was brought up. His body was discovered this week alongside that of Cecilia Julia McKitterick, in the farmhouse that the couple shared in Askeaton.

The Ruttle family plot contains a heart-shaped plaque erected to commemorate the death of a baby named Annabella Clarinda Ruttle. An inscription claims that the baby died on December 2nd, 2011, and that she was the “treasured baby daughter” of Tom and Croéin Ruttle, one of Cecilia McKitterick’s dozens of known aliases.

Garda sources say McKitterick claimed to have prematurely given birth to the child, who she said died. We now know that at the time of the claimed birth, McKitterick would have been nine weeks short of her 60th birthday.
It is just one more strange and inexplicable aspect of McKitterick’s life.

Although Tom Ruttle had been estranged from his two adult sons during his relationship with McKitterick, the sons have now claimed him for burial. On Friday McKitterick’s body was lying unclaimed in the morgue of University Hospital Limerick. It appears nobody wants the woman with 40 names.

McKitterick conned people north and south of the Border, and on both sides of the Atlantic, for more than three decades. She continued to deceive up to the time she was last seen alive. Her past had been catching up with her. She faced financial ruin, public exposure and likely imprisonment. ...

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/irel...-strange-death-of-an-irish-conwoman-1.2222529
 
A serial con artist amassed $1 million dollars in two years by promising legal status to undocumented Irish living in the US. Ralph Cucciniello, pretending to be an attorney, claimed to have found a loophole in the immigration system and promised his victims a path to legal status if they enrolled in a program he was running, theIrish Times reports.

Anne Muldoon, a Belfast woman who was 23-years-old at the time, met Cucciniello in 2006.

“He had a big, smiley face and he was super friendly,” she says. “I went up to Yale with a group of friends, and he would hug the girls and high-five the guys. He was larger than life.”

Claiming he was a visiting attorney with Yale’s Immigration Law Clinic, he told Muldoon and her friends they were lucky to be accepted into his exclusive program.

“There were a few other faces I knew on the train up to Yale,” Muldoon says. “The Irish community in Queens, where I was living, was very tight-knit, and we all knew each other. I remember the look on our faces; we were all so excited. We were thinking, 'We’re going to get legal through this. We’re all going to be part of this process, and it’s going to be great.'”

The group was told they would need to fill out forms, attend a medical, get fingerprints and biometrics done, and pay Cucciniello a fee of $5,000. ...

http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Co...IC - Re-do with Main List suppressed - June 4
 
The conned becomes a conman so that he can continue being conned.

Western Australia's consumer protection agency is warning people against an "insidious" scam by a former fraud victim in which $200,000 has been lost to date.

Consumer Protection said Moora resident Gerardus "Gerry" Hermanus Jorissen took money from at least 10 people over the last few years, purportedly for an investment scheme.

However, the funds were sent offshore in an attempt to retrieve money Mr Jorissen believes he is owed from a Nigerian oil investment in the 1980s.

Acting Commissioner for Consumer Protection David Hillyard said Mr Jorissen promised investors a high rate of return, before sending the money overseas to scammers.

"[Mr Jorissen is] absolutely convinced that the funds will eventually come back to him, but it's been a never-ending story of sending more and more money overseas to these perpetrators of the original scam," Mr Hillyard said.

"Because he's run out of funds, he's now getting other members of the community to pay him money to send off overseas."

Mr Hillyard said a Supreme Court order was made last year to prevent Mr Jorissen from soliciting funds to send overseas, but evidence emerged earlier this year that he had breached the order. ...

http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2015-...warning-issued-by-consumer-protection/6566980
 
Well, they didn't have e-mails from Nigerian gentlemen promising riches back in the 80s, so this guy at least has the satisfaction of being way ahead of his time.
 
Art dealer David Carter admits selling fake famous Cornwall paintings
24 June 2015

An art dealer has admitted intentionally selling fakes of paintings by a famous Cornish artist for tens of thousands of pounds.
David Carter, 58, of Prospect Close, Hayle, pleaded guilty to seven counts of fraud at Truro Crown Court.
He dishonestly claimed the works, which sold for up to £50,000, had been created by celebrated painters such as Alfred Wallis.
An investigation was launched after a complaint to trading standards.

Carter bought the works from websites called "any old tat" and "credit crunch my ass" for hundreds of pounds between 2009 and 2011, the court was told.
Alex Greenwood, prosecuting, said: "Nothing compatible with acceptable provenance was obtained by the defendant, he knew that. The paintings were bought for a fraction of the sale price.
"The valuing of those works are multiples of their true value, which he knew. It was dishonest, false and misleading."
Carter ran Hayle Art Gallery in Cornwall and claimed to have "expertise in the field in particular Cornish artists"

An investigation by Cornwall Trading Standards found Carter bought six paintings advertised as by artist Alfred Wallis from the websites.
He put the paintings up for sale despite questioning the seller about their authenticity saying "they seem genuine but if they are I'd be very surprised".
Carter bought one painted glass fishing float, allegedly by Wallis and described by an expert as "maritime bric-a-brac" for £316.77 and tried to sell it for £60,000.

The court heard in 2011 he took part in a BBC programme called "Hidden paintings of the South West" where he was made aware reputable experts believed some of his Wallis paintings were fake.
Speaking outside court, Carol Gasser, who bought the painting "Boats leaving Newlyn harbour" for £5,000 said: "I was bitterly disappointed. I loved it when I bought it but I was thoroughly disappointed when I found out it was a fake."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-33241871
 
A bogus business school owner convicted of fraud is still missing one month after a warrant was issued for her arrest, police have said.

Tina Beloveth Powerful, 47, was found guilty of fraud and false advertising at Milton Keynes Magistrates' Court

An arrest warrant was issued in July after she failed to appear for three sentencing hearings.

A Thames Valley Police spokeswoman said the warrant is "still outstanding and officers are working to locate her".

The force refused to reveal whether Powerful, of Ascot House, Milton Keynes, has attempted to leave the country or how many times they have tried to arrest her.

The case against Powerful and her Everest School of Transformational Management has been to Milton Keynes Magistrates' Court 11 times.

She had offered courses and degrees her business school did not have the correct accreditation for and advertised facilities that did not exist, including a library.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-34049717
 
What a waste of a brilliant name. She should be made to hand it over to someone worthy of it.
 
Information watchdog investigates 'charity data sales'

The Information Commissioner's Office is looking into claims that an 87-year-old man's personal details were sold or passed on by charities up to 200 times.
The Daily Mail reports that Samuel Rae, who has dementia, lost £35,000 after his information ended up with scammers.
Information was passed to charities when Mr Rae filled in a survey but did not tick a box stating that he did not want his personal details shared.

The watchdog will consider whether any breaches of the law have taken place.
Former army colonel Mr Rae is said to have been contacted by and asked for money by charities more than 730 times after his data was repeatedly sold.

As well as selling, sharing and swapping details, the paper says some charities also passed them on to rogue firms responsible for scams and Mr Rae was later targeted by fraudsters.
Charities contacted him for up to five years after he had asked them to stop, with some requesting money as many as 38 times in a year.
Mr Rae is cared for by his son, who said he was horrified by how his father had been treated.

Steve Eckersley, of the Information Commissioner's Office, said the findings - presented after a Mail investigation using the Data Protection Act - were "clearly concerning".
He told the newspaper: "If charities are buying and selling personal information without any thought of the wishes of the people involved, it suggests not only a disregard for the law, but also a disconnect with the supporters whose generosity they rely on."

In July, the government said it was changing legislation to help protect vulnerable people from aggressive fundraising and launched a review into the current system of self-regulation.
Charities are to be forced to draw up written agreements showing how vulnerable people will be protected from aggressive fundraising tactics, the prime minister said.
David Cameron said the actions of some fundraisers were damaging the reputation of the charity sector.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34111788
 
Couldn't find the Irony thread so I'll drop this here:

Fraudsters are using the Action Fraud name to trick people into handing over personal information.

Fraudsters are cold calling victims claiming to be from Action Fraud and the police to trick them into handing over account numbers, sort codes and other personal information.

Action Fraud and the police would never under any circumstances call you to request information such as this.
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Action for Fraud
 
Man who allegedly posed as L.A. priest for years arrested, accused of defrauding churchgoers

Erwin Mena called himself “Padre” and celebrated Masses, confessions and baptisms, police say, but he was not your typical man of the cloth.

He was a con man posing as a priest, swindling churchgoers out of several thousands of dollars, police allege in court documents.

Officers arrested Mena, 59, Tuesday in Elysian Park on suspicion of grand theft. LAPD Det. Gary Guevara alleged in court documents that Mena sold parishioners bogus trips to see Pope Francis last year in Philadelphia and New York. He has been charged with 22 felonies and 8 misdemeanors, according to a criminal complaint filed by the L.A. County district attorney’s office.

When asked to comment on the charges while being escorted from LAPD headquarters, Mena said, “Not at this time.” It was unclear whether Mena was being represented by an attorney.

Mena, who also used the surname Menacastro, posed as a priest at St. Ignatius of Loyola parish in Highland Park. for about five months beginning in January 2015, according to Guevara’s affidavit filed in L.A. County Superior Court. Mena traveled from parish to parish, selling CDs that he recorded and peddling a book he claimed to have written titled: “Confessions of a Renegade Catholic Priest,” the affidavit states. ...

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/...-trips-pope-francis-lapd--20160202-story.html
 
The Nigerian government has removed nearly 24,000 workers from its payroll after an audit revealed they did not exist, the Finance Ministry has said.

The move has enabled a monthly saving of around $11,5m (£8m).

The audit is part of an anti-corruption campaign by President Muhammadu Buhari, who took power last year.

Corruption and mismanagement have long been a challenge to Nigeria's growth, and the government has promised to cut costs to face an economic slowdown.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-35683354
 
Children as young as eight are being paid teaching salaries by the state as part of identity fraud in the north-eastern Nigerian state of Bauchi, officials have found.

The scam, which involves drawing the salaries of non-existent civil servants, is widespread, a BBC correspondent in Nigeria says.

But the government has recently been cracking down, removing thousands of "ghost workers" from its payroll.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-35816476?ocid=socialflow_twitter
 
Fake ‘Rothschild’ who lived the high-life in China exposed
Wentworth owners Reignwood and the president of China’s top university were among those fooled by a man with a “charming British accent” and a surname worth its weight in gold

When the president of China’s top university and some of the country’s leading businessmen were introduced to a renowned entrepreneur with a “charming British accent”, they were understandably impressed.

On learning he was a member of the Rothschild family, they became even more excited and immediately sought to exploit any potential link to theinternational banking dynasty.

Unfortunately after loudly boasting of their association they discovered that he was not a member of the world famous Frankfurt Rothschilds, but of the rather less illustrious Finchley branch of the family.

The 64-year-old businessman from North London enjoyed lavish hospitality at the expense of Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University and also the multi-billion pound Reignwood Group, which owns the Wentworth Golf Course.

He was invited to promote Reignwood’s executive helicopter service in Beijing and even appeared at a press conference at wish he was asked what Chinese business could learn from his family’s long history.

The university described Mr Rothschild as “a core member of the prominent Rothschild family, a global financial investor, an entrepreneurial strategist and a philanthropist”. ...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...who-lived-the-high-life-in-China-exposed.html
 
Kevin McGeever: Swindler who faked his own abduction
Wasting Garda time is far from the most sensational element of McGeever’s story

The swindles grew more audacious as he crossed continents, €70 million passing through Kevin McGeever’s nuanced hands as he seduced investors inAustralia, the United States, Europe and the United Arab Emirates.

Along the way, there was a fake bank in Liechtenstein, a fake Austrian inFeldkirch, a fake paradise in Dubai, and a fake kidnapping or two.

Some things, of course, were all too real.

On January 29th, 2013, a dishevelled man shuffled from a remote Irish roadside into the lights of an oncoming car. Through sleet rain, electrified on a black night, Catherine Vallely suddenly saw a red glow, and for a moment mistook McGeever’s red trousers, his gaunt face and his billowing white beard for a traffic bollard, blurred in the lights.

People, all over the world, frequently mistook Kevin McGeever for something he was not.

In the course of making We Need To Talk About Kevin, an RTÉ One television documentary, I spent the past three years tracing the intricate sidesteps of McGeever. In a 30-year career, conning his way across four continents, theMayo man has claimed to be many things: a developer, a roofing contractor, a Harvard-educated doctor of arbitration, a psychologist, a bestselling author, and president of the fictional World Trust Bank in Liechtenstein, where he purported to deal exclusively in $100 million trades.

I discovered a pattern of deception that began in 1973, when, aged 29, he abandoned his first convertible Jaguar sports car at Dublin Airport and, overnight, left behind astonished friends and a small, unfinished housing development that he had been building in Naas, Kildare. ...

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/crim...-own-abduction-1.2608108#.Vw4gngXhvFo.twitter
 
Legal loophole that lets millionaire carry on cold calling


Robert Mendick, Chief Reporter
16 April 2016 7:47pm

He drives a £200,000 McLaren sports car, has just bought a 25-room mansion in the Home Counties and at the end of the month will marry his business partner at The Savoy.
But not everybody will be delighted by Tony Abbott’s success, including the 6.5 million people who each year are plagued by nuisance calls made by his company Reactiv Media.
The company was fined £75,000 by the official watchdog for making intrusive phone calls, but has so far refused to pay.

The Sunday Telegraph can disclose how Mr Abbott has exploited a legal loophole to avoid paying the fine. He has put Reactiv Media into the hands of receivers, leaving the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) and other creditors out of pocket.

The move will not stop Mr Abbott, 44, continuing his lucrative cold-calling business. The call centre, based in a market town in West Yorkshire, is being run through another of Mr Abbott’s companies, called Flip It Marketing, which was only set up last September.

The ICO spent a year and a half investigating Reactiv Media for making unsolicited nuisance calls, before fining the company £50,000 in July 2014, which was later increased to £75,000.

Reactiv Media employees cold-called home owners to sell insurance, conduct lifestyle surveys and seek out potential claimants who had been mis-sold PPI. Its database contains eight million phone numbers. Almost two years on, the fine, which Reactiv Media contested, remains unpaid.

etc...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/201...-that-lets-millionaire-carry-on-cold-calling/

Bastard!! But next time I get a cold call, I'll ask if I'm speaking to Tony Abbott - if the caller says no, then I'll reply
"I want to speak to the organ grinder, not the monkey!" :twisted:
 
A Cardiff -based jeweller was defrauded of diamonds and watches worth £420,000 after being paid in “Monopoly” money, a court has heard.

Gianni Accamo, of no fixed address, denies conspiracy to commit fraud in August 2014 by making false representations in order to obtain the goods.

Bristol Crown Court heard how 44-year-old Accamo was part of a gang which arranged to meet Welsh jeweller Jack Cohen in a meeting room at a Bristol hotel.

Dragoslav Djordjevic and his sons Juliano and Bruno Nikolic have admitted the charge.

Paid in euros
But Accamo denies being part of the conspiracy, which prosecutors said saw real euro notes being exchanged for counterfeit notes marked with the word “Monopoly”.

A jury heard Mr Cohen had struck a deal to sell the goods in a meeting room at the Marriot Hotel in Bristol. ...

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/w...ios_WalesOnlineNewsApp_AppShare_Click_Twitter
 
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