UK Pension Scammers Ordered to Repay £13.7 Million

Friendly Pensions conned 245 victims over a two-year period.

The UK’s High Court has ordered four people who ran a series of pension scams to pay back £13.7 million they conned from their victims.

According to The Pensions Regulator (TPR), the four used cold-calling and similar techniques to persuade 245 people to transfer their pension savings to 11 scam pensions operated by the ironically named Friendly Pensions Limited (FPL).

“The defendants siphoned off millions of pounds from the schemes on what they falsely claimed were fees and commissions,” said Nicola Parish, TPR’s executive director of frontline regulation. “They all took part in stripping the schemes almost bare. This left hardly anything behind from the savings their victims had set aside over decades of work to pay for their retirements.”

Between November 2012 and September 2014, the victims were cold-called or lured by a series of scam websites and persuaded to transfer their pension funds into one of 11 plans. The victims were told their pensions would be reinvested, and that they would be paid an upfront cash lump sum for making the transfer. They were also falsely told that their funds would be put into assets, bonds, and HM Revenue & Customs-compliant investments to meet the target return of 5% a year.

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TPR had asked the High Court to order the defendants—David Austin, Susan Dalton, Alan Barratt, and Julian Hanson—to repay the funds they dishonestly misused or misappropriated from the pension plans. It was the first time such an order has been obtained, according to TPR.

Judge Mark Pelling ruled that Austin had been the “mastermind,” but added that all four had acted dishonestly.

Austin installed Barratt, Dalton, and Hanson as the trustees for the scam pension plans. The three were then paid to act on his instructions, allowing the funds to be used however Austin wanted. Barratt and Dalton also acted as salesmen for Austin’s Spain-based business, Select Pension Investments, persuading victims to transfer their pensions to him.

TPR said that between 10% and 25% of the funds transferred were given back to the victims as their “rebate,” although many victims were assured that this payment had come from the investment provider, not from their own pension savings. More than £1 million was paid to so-called “introducers” or “agents,” who used cold-calling to encourage pension members to transfer over their funds.

Dalriada, the independent trustee appointed by TPR to take over the running of the plans, will now be able to move forward with confiscating the four’s assets for the benefit of their victims.

“The High Court’s ruling means that Dalriada can now go after the assets and investments of those involved to try to recover at least some of the money that these corrupt people took,” said Parish. “This case sends a clear message that we will take tough action against pension scammers.”

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Soros Rips Facebook, Google at Davos

Warns of Orwellian levels of control if more stringent monopoly policies are not applied.

In addition to reflecting on the state of geopolitics and reversing the rise of nationalism in his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, George Soros went on a 1984-fueled tirade against Facebook and Google.

The hedge fund leader slammed the tech giants “monopolistic behavior,” declaring their motions and control of the internet as “obstacles to innovation,” while also mentioning that they have caused a litany of problems which we have only recently begun to unravel.

“Companies earn their profits by exploiting their environment. Mining and oil companies exploit the physical environment; social media companies exploit the social environment,” he said, according to a transcript obtained by CIO. “This is particularly nefarious because social media companies influence how people think and behave without them even being aware of it. This has far-reaching, adverse consequences on the functioning of democracy, particularly on the integrity of elections.”

Soros also went on to mention that while the two companies operate by expanding their outreach to users on convenient platforms, there are underlying issues surrounding their sizes, influence, and dominant worldwide outreach, which has created a world where users are not only deceived by the platforms based on their agendas, but also willingly give up their autonomy. Soros likened these tactics to that of a casino, where patrons are roped into coming back regardless of their situation.

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“Social media companies deceive their users by manipulating their attention and directing it towards their own commercial purposes. They deliberately engineer addiction to the services they provide. This can be very harmful, particularly for adolescents. There is a similarity between internet platforms and gambling companies,” he said. “Something very harmful and maybe irreversible is happening to human attention in our digital age. Not just distraction or addiction; social media companies are inducing people to give up their autonomy. The power to shape people’s attention is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies.”

Soros also warned that the IT monopolies would also compromise themselves in order to create corporate and state-sponsored surveillances with countries such as Russia and China. Soros likened this idea of a totalitarian-controlled web to an Orwellian nightmare.

“There could be an alliance between authoritarian states and these large, data-rich IT monopolies that would bring together nascent systems of corporate surveillance with an already developed system of state-sponsored surveillance,” he said. “US-based IT monopolies are already tempted to compromise themselves in order to gain entrance to these vast and fast-growing markets. The dictatorial leaders in these countries may be only too happy to collaborate with them since they want to improve their methods of control over their own populations, and expand their power and influence in the United States and the rest of the world.”

Soros suggested Facebook and Google should be subject to more stringent regulations which would “preserve competition, innovation, and fair and open universal access,” as well as taxation, stating that those two factors will be the death knell for the companies. He praised European Union Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager for the EU’s direction on monopoly policy as well as the strengthening on its privacy and data laws, declaring her the “nemesis” of the tech titans.

“The owners of the platform giants consider themselves the masters of the universe, but in fact they are slaves to preserving their dominant position. It is only a matter of time before the global dominance of the US IT monopolies is broken. Davos is a good place to announce that their days are numbered,” he said.

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