"Concerned about rising UK inflation?" the advert on Facebook asks. "Download your free investor guide to learn how to invest in secured UK fixed rate bonds offering the highest interest rates."
Sounds innocent enough, what could go wrong with ordering a free guide?
At lot, it turns out, be because the ad, pictured above, has been placed by criminals whose aim is to defraud savers.
It has appeared repeatedly in various guises on the social media platform and, despite repeated warnings, Facebook is still carrying it.
You can’t say that it's hard to spot, the crooks hardly bother to vary the artwork and use the same strapline: “Invest safely in secured UK bonds”.
The only change is the landing page – previous ones having been shut down by the website hosting companies.
If you click on the latest version of the ad you go to fixedbonds.org.
This promises that you’ll be investing in bonds regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority that pay tempting returns of up to 6.9% per year.
But there are obvious red flags, such as the fact the website gives no contact details or company information.
It is a data harvesting exercise, hoping you’ll fill in a box in order to be sent that free income bonds investors guide.
I inputted the details of one of my fake online personas and was called by someone claiming to be from York Global Finance.
The returns he said they could offer on bonds now went up to the even better rate of 8.75%.
To add reassurance, I was told that York Global Finance has an office in central London with the head office in Luxembourg, where it is regulated by the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier, or CSSF.
There is a genuine company called York Global Finance and it is regulated by the CSSF but – and this is where the scam is very clever – it does not have a website.
So if you search online you’ll find yorkglobalfinance.com, which has been set up by the fraudsters, and because there’s no genuine website you won’t have any reason to suspect this is a sham.
The real York Global Finance is an offshoot of New York investment giant York Capital Management, which at one time managed assets of $30billion. It dealt with institutional investors such as pension funds, never the average saver.
I alerted it to yorkglobalfinance.com and a spokesman said: “The website is fraudulent. We have told the Financial Conduct Authority and the Luxembourg authority about it.”
Now both financial authorities have published consumer alerts, the CSSF saying: “They use targeted advertisements on various social media platforms to reach consumers.”
I also took this up with Facebook owner Meta, which removed the account behind the latest version of the scam ad.
“Promoting financial scams is against our policies and we’re dedicating significant resources to tackling this industry-wide issue, on and off our platforms,” said a spokesman.
“We have started rolling out a new process that requires all financial services advertisers to be authorised by the FCA so they can run ads targeting users in the UK.”
Investment bonds expert Mark Taber says he has seen 20 variations of this bonds scam appear on Facebook.
“While it is a positive step that Facebook will be requiring all financial services to be FCA authorised, the years of pressure it has taken suggest that Facebook still does not understand the extent of the harm and number of lives ruined by scammers targeting their victims online,” he said.
“This case also raises big questions about UK authorities and regulators. This scam site and its variants have clearly been targeting victims for years, yet despite all the reports no effective action has been taken to disrupt them, let alone track them down and prosecute them.”
It strikes me that there are two ways forward here.
One is to carry on letting social media self-regulate itself in the hope that it eventually cleans up its act.
The other is for Parliament to enact the Online Safety Bill with effective penalties to deter platforms like Facebook from profiting from scamverts.
* Latest annual figures from the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau show an increase of almost 50% in the total loss to investment fraud, up from £596million to £890million.
“Criminals are evolving the way that they target people with bogus investment opportunities, with many victims now being targeted on social media,” warns the City of London Police.
investigate@mirror.co.uk
