London's scammers find a new tactic • "I felt sick... They’re doing everything except for actually having a flat." • What happens when the scammers get inside the systems?
Obviously as boring old-fashioned journalists we repeatedly asked the Property Redress Scheme for comment over many weeks. No word and we still don't know what went wrong with their checks and what those checks involve.
I was able to get quite far with registering London Centric as an estate agent on their system (I didn't want to check if our application would be approved because I didn't want to waste the fee).
If you want to check their live register, you can search it here. It's still got the scam company at the heart of this story listed as a full active member despite our repeated warnings: https://www.propertyredress.co.uk/agent-finder
Absolutely! We love our city, its communites and culture, but know it is a magnet for oligarchs, tax-evasion and exploitation galore. Which is why London Centric is so important and everyone who can, should subscribe (you are literally the only entity I pay a subscription to).
Yes - it’s interesting, isn’t it? I briefly had a Revolut account but got twitchy over it when I saw them being used in a few other scams. All I can guess is that their account holder verification has a hole in it that is being easily exploited - which would indicate that the FCA should be taking a closer look given their new banking status.
Ah, you don’t actually get the keys to “your” crypto with Revolut. There’s very little you can do with it - you can’t send it anywhere and to cash back out you still need your Revolut account.
Didn’t realise that! I’d use Revolut to cash in a tiny fraction of a Bitcoin I found on my old university laptop hard drive and just thought it was fully integrated and went woah this is a potential scammers paradise.
Yup. I’ve always assumed the money gets moved almost immediately out of the UK banking structure, probably to some offshore crypto account. Why Revolut is interesting here is that it must be (a) easier to set up disposable accounts to funnel money through and (b) might be easier to execute wires to external accounts to “non-traditional” destinations (i.e. offshore crypto). Either way, there’s a reason Revolut keeps on popping up and it’s probably not a great one…
It’s the same with all small banks, they just don’t have the staff to build custom modelling and instead have to rely on third party models that aren’t tailored to their customer base.
It goes both ways, they’ll also frequently freeze accounts / sums of money for no apparent reason. I suspect their KYC/AML checks are all AI or whatever (scammy)
I’d bet there’s nothing as “smart” as ai behind whatever controls they have. Banking institutions are very bad at this stuff, and scammers learn very quickly what works and what doesn’t.
High street banks also (used to?) get exploited with this stuff - including clever combinations of business and personal accounts to swerve the limits in place on both. Most likely is just that scammers prefer revolut and other online banks because of instant online opening.
The issue is that it’s very likely the name on the account is also someone who opened it with legit id and handed over control to, or took instructions on how to use it from, the actual fraudster behind this who offer people “easy money work from home” jobs on instagram et al
It’ll be where the company directors were recruited as well.
Sure seems like something like a redress scheme that is actually meaningful should require a substantial deposit from an agent to join as a member. What an absolute scam that entire register appears to be: did Callum try to raise a case with them as a tenant?
I first became aware of scams like this about 15 years ago when I first moved to London. For every flat that I've rented I've done the following: I) ideally go via a letting agent with physical premises. This can be faked, but it's more difficult. However in today's rental market it's not always possible II) Search the flat on the Land Registry and check who the owner is. There is a small cost to this (used to be 3 quid, now 7). There are predatory scam sites that try and sell you minimally dressed up title packs for four or five times the cost - you need the gov.uk land registry site. You want the title register. If it's a big block this can be confusing as there can be several leases but you want the shortest registered lease with your flat number on it. III) Don't sign a lease or transfer money beyond at most a small holding deposit until you've received a copy of the landlords ID and (ideally) met them.
This once saved me from signing a lease with a landlady when I should have signed it with her company that owned the property.
I've also had Landlords complain vociferously about showing me ID until I set out in detail exactly the scam I was afraid of.
On the one occasion where the landlord did not yet own the new build flat, he was able to instruct his lawyers to send me an email setting out his intent to buy and sharing a copy of the contract. I was able to check their SRA number and ring them to check it was genuine.
These steps don't totally eliminate risk. They do however lower it. The other thing to do before transferring significant sums of money is to ring up a number that was *not* in the email requesting funds and verify the bank details.
A guy I worked with, a solicitor, was caught by a similar fake agency scam in 2007. A lot of people seemed to have been with that specific address he later found out.
He was new to the UK but also not the most credulous person given profession but still got scammed just like everyone else.
So it has been around for a while I guess, just perhaps easier now to look professional than it once was.
Redress schemes: are they worthwhile? From the consumers' point of view, clearly they are not.
Last summer my neighbour and I were scammed by a so-called roofing company. It was registered with all the right bodies, including Companies House, and proudly displayed their logos on its website. The decider for us was that it was on Which? Trusted Traders.
When things went wrong, the scammer simply quit each body we approached and each of them then said, "sorry, the business is no longer covered by our scheme." In other words, he could quit the schemes quicker than we could fill in their complaint forms. We were each left with a £2,000 loss and a roof that would not keep birds out, let alone the rain. He had clearly done this before and is bound to do it again. At £2,000 Action Fraud are not interested either. What a strange country we have become.
Thank you for exposing this outrageous scam. Let's hope that like other failings you've exposed it will be picked up by the right people and dealt with. And that you get appropriate credit too!
I'm relieved the young man got his money back in the end, but it was still a horrible and stressful experience, when he'd tried so hard to make sure it was legitimate.
I'm left wondering about that professional young woman who showed him round, knowing it was a scam. What was going through her mind. Just the money she would get?
Anyway, thanks again for a fantastic bit of work and reporting.
Yeah, I wondered the same! Was she 'in on it', as a key part of the scam? Or was she briefly hired / subcontracted by this seemingly reputable letting agency to show properties, and somehow got scammed as well? I can hardly imagine Anchor Gate Lettings Ltd was putting her salary through PAYE
That's the thing with these scams. There may be multiple layers of deceit. It would make it more convincing if she thought she was doing a real job wouldn't it. Nasty piece of work all round. One to share with any potential renter friends. 🙁
Two other points seem to emerge from this: the potential harm caused by endless government outsourcing to private companies and the inability of any local or central government body to monitor or enforce consumer regulations.
First, giving a commercial company the say on a supposed official regulatory scheme just gives them an incentive to rake in fees and allows the government to wash its hands of any responsibility.
Secondly, as an example, my local council introduced selective 5-year licensing for private rented properties, charging landlords a £600 fee. However, they confirmed they won't inspect properties for compliance with gas/lx regulations, smoke alarms, etc, before issuing a licence, or carry out any subsequent monitoring unless a tenant (or neighbour) complains, because they have neither the money nor the staff; the fee is alleged to be "cost-neutral" – ie, it only pays for the direct costs of staff time and effort in issuing the licences – which (if true) makes one wonder why they bother at all. Under the recent renters' rights act two new compulsory national registers will also be created , one for landlords, one for properties, but it looks as though responsibility for enforcement will again be devolved to local authorities, so the chances of the system being gamed and a whole new raft of scams opening up look very high.
Obviously as boring old-fashioned journalists we repeatedly asked the Property Redress Scheme for comment over many weeks. No word and we still don't know what went wrong with their checks and what those checks involve.
I was able to get quite far with registering London Centric as an estate agent on their system (I didn't want to check if our application would be approved because I didn't want to waste the fee).
If you want to check their live register, you can search it here. It's still got the scam company at the heart of this story listed as a full active member despite our repeated warnings: https://www.propertyredress.co.uk/agent-finder
The Property Redress Scheme company accounts are here, showing a good profit from collecting these fees: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/08994516/filing-history
Note without comment this quote given to the trade press in 2023 that "we pride ourselves on having a simple joining process". https://thenegotiator.co.uk/news/buying-agent-slams-tpo-as-fat-and-lazy-and-signs-up-to-competitor/
Assume you're well ahead of me, but if PRS are being tight-lipped, would a FOI request help?
As of 2nd August Anchorgate are still listed as 'active' on the Property Redress website. What a shambles of an organisation.
We’re as baffled as you are.
The quality of this report is outstanding.
Thanks for your support Nadia, the secret ingredient is just… working really hard on each piece!
It’s also caring about actual journalism, and London! Both a rarity, unfortunately.
Yeah we do actually quite like London, unlike other news outlets, which is why we’d like to make London better!
Absolutely! We love our city, its communites and culture, but know it is a magnet for oligarchs, tax-evasion and exploitation galore. Which is why London Centric is so important and everyone who can, should subscribe (you are literally the only entity I pay a subscription to).
How is a government approval scheme run by a US insurance company that takes the money and carries out no checks? Which minister approved this?
Another brilliant article but geez, talk about making me angry. Such great journalism.
Shall we do something a bit lighter next, it is a slight problem that my inbox is just a list of "HERE'S ANOTHER INSANE SCAM FOR YOU TO INVESTIGATE".
Someone has to investigate them and at least you and your reporters will do a good job of it
Ha! No, don’t change a thing. The work you and your team are doing is needed!
This is a great - but infuriating - bit of reporting. Thanks!
Did Revolut have any comment on being a front for the account siphoning funds out? Interesting that the scammers chose them as the receiver.
We do regularly find it’s Revolut who were used in scams we investigate.
Yes - it’s interesting, isn’t it? I briefly had a Revolut account but got twitchy over it when I saw them being used in a few other scams. All I can guess is that their account holder verification has a hole in it that is being easily exploited - which would indicate that the FCA should be taking a closer look given their new banking status.
Or possibly their full integration with buying crypto?
Ah, you don’t actually get the keys to “your” crypto with Revolut. There’s very little you can do with it - you can’t send it anywhere and to cash back out you still need your Revolut account.
Didn’t realise that! I’d use Revolut to cash in a tiny fraction of a Bitcoin I found on my old university laptop hard drive and just thought it was fully integrated and went woah this is a potential scammers paradise.
Yup. I’ve always assumed the money gets moved almost immediately out of the UK banking structure, probably to some offshore crypto account. Why Revolut is interesting here is that it must be (a) easier to set up disposable accounts to funnel money through and (b) might be easier to execute wires to external accounts to “non-traditional” destinations (i.e. offshore crypto). Either way, there’s a reason Revolut keeps on popping up and it’s probably not a great one…
It’s the same with all small banks, they just don’t have the staff to build custom modelling and instead have to rely on third party models that aren’t tailored to their customer base.
It goes both ways, they’ll also frequently freeze accounts / sums of money for no apparent reason. I suspect their KYC/AML checks are all AI or whatever (scammy)
I’d bet there’s nothing as “smart” as ai behind whatever controls they have. Banking institutions are very bad at this stuff, and scammers learn very quickly what works and what doesn’t.
High street banks also (used to?) get exploited with this stuff - including clever combinations of business and personal accounts to swerve the limits in place on both. Most likely is just that scammers prefer revolut and other online banks because of instant online opening.
The issue is that it’s very likely the name on the account is also someone who opened it with legit id and handed over control to, or took instructions on how to use it from, the actual fraudster behind this who offer people “easy money work from home” jobs on instagram et al
It’ll be where the company directors were recruited as well.
Sure seems like something like a redress scheme that is actually meaningful should require a substantial deposit from an agent to join as a member. What an absolute scam that entire register appears to be: did Callum try to raise a case with them as a tenant?
I first became aware of scams like this about 15 years ago when I first moved to London. For every flat that I've rented I've done the following: I) ideally go via a letting agent with physical premises. This can be faked, but it's more difficult. However in today's rental market it's not always possible II) Search the flat on the Land Registry and check who the owner is. There is a small cost to this (used to be 3 quid, now 7). There are predatory scam sites that try and sell you minimally dressed up title packs for four or five times the cost - you need the gov.uk land registry site. You want the title register. If it's a big block this can be confusing as there can be several leases but you want the shortest registered lease with your flat number on it. III) Don't sign a lease or transfer money beyond at most a small holding deposit until you've received a copy of the landlords ID and (ideally) met them.
This once saved me from signing a lease with a landlady when I should have signed it with her company that owned the property.
I've also had Landlords complain vociferously about showing me ID until I set out in detail exactly the scam I was afraid of.
On the one occasion where the landlord did not yet own the new build flat, he was able to instruct his lawyers to send me an email setting out his intent to buy and sharing a copy of the contract. I was able to check their SRA number and ring them to check it was genuine.
These steps don't totally eliminate risk. They do however lower it. The other thing to do before transferring significant sums of money is to ring up a number that was *not* in the email requesting funds and verify the bank details.
A guy I worked with, a solicitor, was caught by a similar fake agency scam in 2007. A lot of people seemed to have been with that specific address he later found out.
He was new to the UK but also not the most credulous person given profession but still got scammed just like everyone else.
So it has been around for a while I guess, just perhaps easier now to look professional than it once was.
Redress schemes: are they worthwhile? From the consumers' point of view, clearly they are not.
Last summer my neighbour and I were scammed by a so-called roofing company. It was registered with all the right bodies, including Companies House, and proudly displayed their logos on its website. The decider for us was that it was on Which? Trusted Traders.
When things went wrong, the scammer simply quit each body we approached and each of them then said, "sorry, the business is no longer covered by our scheme." In other words, he could quit the schemes quicker than we could fill in their complaint forms. We were each left with a £2,000 loss and a roof that would not keep birds out, let alone the rain. He had clearly done this before and is bound to do it again. At £2,000 Action Fraud are not interested either. What a strange country we have become.
Thank you for exposing this outrageous scam. Let's hope that like other failings you've exposed it will be picked up by the right people and dealt with. And that you get appropriate credit too!
I'm relieved the young man got his money back in the end, but it was still a horrible and stressful experience, when he'd tried so hard to make sure it was legitimate.
I'm left wondering about that professional young woman who showed him round, knowing it was a scam. What was going through her mind. Just the money she would get?
Anyway, thanks again for a fantastic bit of work and reporting.
Yeah, I wondered the same! Was she 'in on it', as a key part of the scam? Or was she briefly hired / subcontracted by this seemingly reputable letting agency to show properties, and somehow got scammed as well? I can hardly imagine Anchor Gate Lettings Ltd was putting her salary through PAYE
That's the thing with these scams. There may be multiple layers of deceit. It would make it more convincing if she thought she was doing a real job wouldn't it. Nasty piece of work all round. One to share with any potential renter friends. 🙁
Two other points seem to emerge from this: the potential harm caused by endless government outsourcing to private companies and the inability of any local or central government body to monitor or enforce consumer regulations.
First, giving a commercial company the say on a supposed official regulatory scheme just gives them an incentive to rake in fees and allows the government to wash its hands of any responsibility.
Secondly, as an example, my local council introduced selective 5-year licensing for private rented properties, charging landlords a £600 fee. However, they confirmed they won't inspect properties for compliance with gas/lx regulations, smoke alarms, etc, before issuing a licence, or carry out any subsequent monitoring unless a tenant (or neighbour) complains, because they have neither the money nor the staff; the fee is alleged to be "cost-neutral" – ie, it only pays for the direct costs of staff time and effort in issuing the licences – which (if true) makes one wonder why they bother at all. Under the recent renters' rights act two new compulsory national registers will also be created , one for landlords, one for properties, but it looks as though responsibility for enforcement will again be devolved to local authorities, so the chances of the system being gamed and a whole new raft of scams opening up look very high.
The business card did not have an address? They did not have an office?
Honestly my number one rule now is basically "act like a boomer and just do any transactions in person if possible". No office, no party.
If only boomers would follow that advice, they wouldn't get scammed so much themselves.
Agree!
All in order. But turned out to be their accountant. He should be investigated
Great journalism. As for Lebedev ... one day.
Great article highlighting a horrific scam!
Really excellent reporting.
Brilliant reporting and great work guys