Four charged over alleged land banking fraud

It occurs to me that if the MAS steers potentially vulnerable members of the public away from scams of this type, it will actually serve a useful social purpose. I still resent having to pay for it, though.

This and so many other scams are so easily avoided if regulators etc got off their high horses about RDR TCF etc and set out to protect consumers BEFORE THE EVENT rather than always AFTER the damage has been done - we see this thing all day long and yet the FSA etc Fiddle while rome burns only doing something when as ever its too late - .... why oh why do we still - or the govt still put up with this...

@ Chris

And how do the FSA (or any other body for that matter) prevent these sort of scams before they happen? Looking at Companies House reveals these firms either had no business listing or were involved in property development and real estate sales. Presumably there are quite a few entirely legitimate businesses registered in this area as well - how do you spot the legitimate ones from those that have been established solely to fleece the public - before anyone has been fleeced?

The only time I have seen this happen was in a Hollywood Sci-Fi film involving thought police who were able to identify a criminal before they committed the crime - but I do not know of any reliable method of actually identifying this on earth today.

These are highly sophisticated scamming operations that make thousands of telephone calls in a short space of time - why else are they called boiler room operations? Perhaps instead of criticising all the time, IFAs should be publicising these actions by the FSA on Facebook, Twitter, their websites, and as press releases to local media to try and get the message out to as many people as possible to help them avoid any similar inducements in the future?

The article does note that the FSA has 20 investigations ongoing into unauthorised property-based collective investment schemes so, to be fair, they're doing their best to uncover wrongdoing before people get ripped off.

Then again, rather than spending £43.7m of our money (in year one) on trying to encourage people who, in these straitened times, may well have hardly anything to spend on financial planning, to seek out financial advice, might these resources not be better deployed on publicising the dangers of entertaining any discussion of anything that involves investing money with someone who's called you out of the blue and of whom you've never heard, let alone been recommended to? Perhaps I shouldn't have suggested that ~ they'll probably do it as well as the MAS and there'll be yet another tier of levies, this one for the Financial Crime Prevention Taskforce.

No organisation can do absolutely everything or make others do so. Hence the Statutory Code of Practice For Regulators talks about its intention that those bodies who are supposed to be subject to it (which, according to a letter from the FSA to my MP, it claims to be) should embed into their regulatory culture and processes a risk-based, proportionate and targeted approach to what they do.

But what do we see instead? The FSA trying to make everybody else do absolutely everything, record and report it all to the powers that be, whilst Adair Turner calls endlessly more staff, more resources, more powers and, as always more MONEY. So the large scale rip-offs continue, whilst small firms get shut down for having failed to spend £10,000 on a skilled persons' report. Yes, according to the strict letter of FSA rules, that small firm was probably at fault, but will swatting it like some tiresome insect really make that much difference, set against large scale mis-selling scandals as we saw with Barclays and Aviva, on which the FSA was so tardy in taking action that the victims actually had to march on Parliament to petition their MP's to give the FSA a boot up its backside to do its job and protect them? It's very hard to believe the FSA's claim that it takes a fig of notice of either the spirit or the letter of the Regulators' Code. And anyway, is it the FSA's job to investigate criminal matters beyond whether or not a CIS should be regulated but isn't?