Over £78 million lost to clone firm scams in 2020, FCA warns

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The FCA recently issued a new report according to which in the past year there has been a disturbing new trend – clone firm scams have increased immensely. According to recent data, British citizens have lost about 78 million pounds to such scammers. That makes about 45,242 pounds lost per single victim on average.
Clone companies pretend to be legitimate ones through impersonating actual legitimate companies. In the United Kingdom they do so by pretending to hold a license issued by the FCA – in their case that’s a license issued to a different company. What is even more disturbing is that while most traders (about 75%) are confident that they could recognize a scammer if necessary, an even higher percentage (77%) did not actually know what a clone firm is.
An even more disturbing trend – between March and April, when the UK was in lockdown, the number of clone companies increased by 29%.
Source
Personally, I am not at all surprised – at the beginning of 2020, when the pandemic and the lockdowns began, one of my first thoughts was how this would make all the scammers crawl out of the woodwork to take advantage of vulnerable people. And they did.


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