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EVERY week, Tony Hetherington replies to readers' letters, adding comments, advice and the results of his enquiries.
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If you think you are a victim of financial mismanagement, or want advice before investing, write to Tony Hetherington, Financial Mail, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TS. Sorry, but he cannot give personal replies. Please send only copies of documents - if these are relevant to your enquiry. We regret that they cannot be returned.
D.B. writes: You often report that companies you've named have been closed by the Department of Trade & Industry. But does anybody go to jail?
ONLY a tiny number of con artists ever go to jail. Almost without exception, they are left to start another scam.
As demands on the police have risen, chief constables have moved fraud squad officers to other duties. The Serious Fraud Office deals only with big numbers or complex issues, preferably both. Cheats who get away with, say, £1 million are unlikely to be tracked by the SFO.
Protection from local authority trading standards departments is patchy. Budget squeezes have resulted in cuts and officers are more likely to deal with counterfeit videos than with bogus investment schemes and pyramid scams.
The Office of Fair Trading is narcoleptic. It would give Mickey Mouse a licence as a credit adviser, and its much-heralded Stop Now orders ('Halt rogue traders in 14 days!') take so long to arrive that they make the Hundred Years War seem like a brief skirmish.
The Financial Services Authority employs lions led by donkeys. Hang around Canary Wharf and you can see regulators and investigators weeping tears of frustration because FSA lawyers have yet again decided that the safest action is no action.
The Home Office is barely aware it has any legal responsibility for acting against scams such as chain letters that count as unlicensed lotteries. It is a dead duck.
And finally, there is the Department of Trade & Industry, which investigates suspect companies. It has certainly increased its efforts and has wiped out pretty well all the bogus wine investment firms and charity scam companies. But it needs an intelligence unit to become proactive instead of moving in after people have already been cheated.
Having said all this, a few fraudsters do go to jail. Julian Blee ran the House of Delacroix champagne scam business, which Financial Mail warned against in 1997, and then the Coubert Group cognac company, which we warned against in 1998. He was jailed for five years.
Craig Dean was also involved in House of Delacroix and later headed a Portuguese drinks scam firm called Helmsley. Financial Mail sounded the alarm in 1998, and in March 2001 he was jailed for three years.
And Russell Coxon ran MGF Accountancy, a crooked firm that claimed to help people with debt problems. I wrote about him in 1997 and gave evidence to Staffordshire Police. In May 2002, he was jailed for two years.
A more common penalty is for tricksters to be banned from running a company. The DTI has just won High Court orders banning Alexander William Guy Rymil Ransby from acting as a director of any company for the next 11 years.
His father, Brigadier Geoffrey Paul Rymil Ransby, was banned for nine years. Together they ran a scam wine company called Ransby Hoare Limited, which I warned against in October 2000.
But there are the vast number of people linked to scams who walk away unscathed. Three weeks ago, £6m art investment company Taylor Jardine went bust. Its chairman, Lieutenant-Colonel Ewen Southby-Tailyour, played a major role in convincing people the company was safe and respectable. He now tells me he had no hand in managing the business.
In short, if you are young, amoral, would like to travel to scam centres such as Spain or Thailand, and want high rewards for modest effort, a career as a con artist beckons.
I will probably name you in these pages. Financial Mail might even publish your picture and embarrass your friends and family. But you will make good money and the chances of seeing the inside of a cell are remote.
When a history tells us nothing
J. M. writes: I applied to open a Cahoot account but was turned down because I had a poor credit score. I obtained my file from the Experian credit agency and it showed a perfect history.
YOU look like a safe bet for any bank. Your house is worth £435,000, you earn £65,000 a year and your wife has a salary of £88,000.
So I asked Cahoot's owner, Abbey National, to comment. And the explanation highlights the difference between a credit record and a credit score.
Your personal credit record is fine. But your credit score, in which Cahoot gives points for income, length of time in your job and so on, might not match the profile of the new customers that the company wants.
Credit scoring is an arcane art. Companies do not reveal details because applicants would then alter their circumstances to guarantee success. But as an example, a credit card issuer might reject someone because it would never earn any interest from them.
Having said all this, Cahoot has reconsidered your application. I understand you wanted to borrow £5,000. A formal offer for this amount has now been sent to you.
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