Beware of Fraudulent Share Scams

Share scams are often run from ‘boiler rooms’ where fraudsters cold-call investors offering them worthless, overpriced or even non-existent shares. While they promise high returns, those who invest usually end up losing their money. 

Boiler rooms use increasingly sophisticated tactics to approach investors offering to buy or sell shares in a way that they say will give investors a huge return. But in the end, victims are often left out of pocket – sometimes losing all of their savings or even their family home.

Beware of individuals purporting to be from

Prudential Global or 

Swiss Investment Corporation 

These individuals may seek to extract payments to recover assets on behalf of investors where they fraudulently claim the proceeds will be invested in Fundsmith. This often involves extracting further payments as a to top-up to original investments elsewhere.

In addition our cyber threat intelligence services have identified a web address (domain) that was recently created and where we believe there is criminal intent behind the registration.

Specifically this means it is likely to be used to send emails purporting to be from Fundsmith. 

The bogus domain is:

www.fundsmithequity.com

We strongly urge all clients to consider blocking emails from this domain and be aware of the potential for fake information or money requests, malicious attachments or links coming from emails from this address or other imitators.

Fundsmith is monitoring the situation and liaising with domain registrars and others in an attempt to have this domain closed.  

If you have any queries on this, please contact us on 0330 123 1815 or the Financial Conduct Authority. You can report a firm or scam to the FCA by contacting their Consumer Helpline on 0800 111 6768 or using their reporting form. The aforementioned firms have already been reported.

Specifically we recommend following the FCA's 10 steps to avoid scams from unauthorised firms which can be found by clicking the link below;

https://www.fca.org.uk/consumers/avoid-scams-unauthorised-firms