Would it be okay if I asked you to sign a petition on the government website? Let me explain why.
At Chatfield we are very proud of the standards we work to, the transparency and honesty we give to clients, that we are both Chartered Wealth Managers and at the forefront of our profession.
However, there is a murky world of scammers, fraudsters and con artists out there cold calling you about your pension and investments. These people need to be stopped as unsuspecting members of the public are losing most, if not all, of their pension.
Funnily enough cold calling about mortgages is banned but not for pensions and investments. These people are unregulated, which means if anything goes wrong you have no protection or compensation. The investments are also unregulated; hotels in the Caribbean or Cape Verde islands, Brazilian teak plantations, pink diamonds, car parks in Dubai, storage facilities in the UK for example.
They all offer the financial holy grail of high returns and low risk. But then they would, wouldn’t they! Because they are unregulated they can say what they like.
The investments are also invariably property based and with high charges. You can put your money in but good luck getting it back out again.
In July, BBC’s Panorama did a programme on exactly this, which you can still watch here.
Like me you may also have been cold called about “unlocking your frozen pension” (which before age 55 is illegal and will leave you with some eye watering tax penalties). I added a person called ‘Ignore’ to my phone a couple of years ago to avoid them (they never leave a message, do they) and now have 77 phone numbers here.
You can read the following 7-page booklet here, it neatly summarises how these people operate and is well worth a read.
Like the rest of the financial planning profession I find it immensely frustrating that not enough is being done to stop this. And this is why a fellow financial planner has set up a petition on the government’s website to ban cold calling about pensions and investments.
It needs 10,000 signatures for the government to respond and 100,000 signatures to be debated in the House of Commons. It won’t stop every scam but surely it can only help. It has already attracted support from a lot of MPs, former pensions minister Ros Altmann, who has raised the subject in the House of Lords, The Daily Telegraph and Love Money website.
Please join me in signing the petition: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/166980
Live long and prosper
Philip Challinor Director
