If there's one thing about duped investors that everyone should know, it's that they are some of the most resilient, driven people you will ever meet.
Faced with adversity, they will not give up. By the time they've made contact with me or my colleagues to make their plight public, they know the ins and outs of their complex case and where they stand and what has gone wrong.
Usually they've traced entries on Companies House, they've exchanged details with fellow investors, and have formed action groups.
They know the connections between the people who sold them, the investment, the widening web of interconnected associates – granted not all is always correct but they are on the case. So why doesn't the regulator seem to be on the case?
It's the bigger picture that's not being tackled.It's a wild west out there, everybody knows that.
Since the pension freedom reforms were announced in 2014, pension savers have been fair game. Scams flourished.
Savers were targeted for their pension funds on the one hand and their regulatory dispute awards on the other – 10-20 per cent of £150,000+ pensions upfront; 30 per cent of £85,000 Financial Services Compensation Scheme money to finish the client relationship off.
This is bad practice, of course, but even worse is the fact that we all know about it. Why aren't these people stopped?
I have investors showing me stacks of paper trails, mountains of what appears to be evidence. But nobody seems interested – their words. They try the police, the Financial Conduct Authority, Financial Ombudsman Service and the FSCS, and more often than not are put on a merry go-round.
It is somewhat ironic that many still struggle to differentiate between the Fos, FSCS and FCA. 'FSCA' is what I hear a lot.
Phoenixing concerns
Granted, the regulator has clamped down on hundreds of individuals, has put phoenixing monitors in place and put tighter controls on claims manager authorisations.
But I'm still coming across serial phoenixers, and I'm still being contacted by desperate investors who are chasing their lost funds and have a hard time understanding how various players in their investment story have got away.
Such is the complexity of this system of bad practice that many individuals are allowed to get away unscathed (and later re-emerge in some cases) while others go down, leaving the innocent to pick up the pieces.
If there's one thing about duped investors that everyone should know it's that they are some of the most resilient, driven people there are.Good advisers have long bemoaned the 'good guys pay' framework, which sees them mop up the bill for bad firms that fail.
This is a related, and entirely legitimate, can of worms that we will leave sealed for now.
But consider the investors, for whom the regulatory dispute system was put in place. Many have lost their pension, the lucky ones made a successful claim, usually recovering much less than their original investment.
There may be the odd case that goes to the Fos, which yields fairer awards, though experience tells us the more systematic cases usually end up collapsing and consequently with the FSCS – see Rowanmoor as a case in point.
Why do I still hear people cry on the phone when they recite what's happened to them, exhausted from trying to get answers but not willing to stop no matter the cost?
Why are the authorities seemingly not interested in their experience?
The regulatory armoury smells oddly of sticking plaster and the message it sends out is not one of hope and justice but of lifeboat rescue mission, dragging battered and soaked souls out of deep and dark waters.
It is rare that a pension scam ends up in court, a place that could make investors feel they've achieved justice. It would have to be outright fraud for that to happen, such as in the Harlequin and Avacade cases.
It is not for a lack of trying to make the regulators aware though. Advisers, victims, journalists: we all report cases.
The standard excuse for slow action is that the firms operate outside of the regulatory perimeter, and some are based abroad.
This makes sense to a point, but not when it comes to working together with the police and tracking the domestic players down.
I hear pledges of strong communication between regulatory bodies and the police, and sometimes there is evidence of that, for instance when hundreds of when phoenix cases are shut down.
But it's the bigger organised networks that do not seem to be tackled.
There is lots of intelligence around; maybe it's time this is harvested.
carmen.reichman@ft.com
