Unfair, misleading and aggressive trading practices used to defraud pensioners are an “industry standard” for the building trade.

This is the view of West Midlands building company directors Sarah Beadle (40) and Martin Evans (58) of Summit Roofguard, who have both been jailed for two and a half years for pressurising pensioners into paying grossly inflated amounts for building work. One paid £20,000 for guttering that could have been repaired for £40, and another was charged £9,585 for work that should have cost £2,820. The over-charging was made possible by victims being told that their properties were in urgent need of repair and that they were getting a discount that was only available for a few hours, two clear indications of a scam. Continue reading →

Fake five-star reviews for worthless products can be bought for as little as 85 pence each from a number of fake review companies prominently listed on Google’s search engines, an investigation by the Sunday Times has found.

For the investigation the newspaper launched a shoddy and ineffective lie detector phone app called Spot the Faker! for iPhone and Android handsets and then marketed it by buying dozens of fake reviews for £120. Many of the fake review firms stole the identities of celebrities and athletes to post them from, and the investigators identified more than a hundred apps that had used the fake review service.

Management of the Wentworth golf club are handicapped by some marketing incompetence, it seems.

Late last year Reignwood, the Surrey club’s Chinese owners, announced it wanted to reduce the number of members from 4,000 to 888 – a number considered lucky in China – and impose a £100,000 re-joining fee on the ones who wanted to come back, this reportedly to finance a large loan the company had taken out and a £20 million bill for urgent improvements to the course and clubhouse. Continue reading →

A Labour MP has been fined £5,000 for sending out automatic telephone calls to Labour supporters urging recipients to back his campaign to become London mayor.

David Lammy sent out 35,000 canvassing calls to people who had not given him permission to contact them, said the Information Commissioner Christopher Graham, likening politicians begging for votes to double glazing salespeople offering discounts.

Lammy finished fourth in the Labour mayoral campaign.

Marketeers we know have been receiving emails from a publisher of advertorials Mr Jack Clarke of Acquisition International as below.

“As the head of (company name) Acquisition International has personally chosen you as a leading MD in the United Kingdom and we welcome you to celebrate this news by joining us with an exclusive interview for our forthcoming issue. The cost for this high-profile spot is just £500 and includes: Continue reading →

Investigators in Germany are probing the role in the VW emissions scandal played by Stuttgart-based Robert Bosch, the large vehicle parts supplier which supplied the software that VW used to cheat emission tests. Bosch say that they were aware that their diesel emission treatment systems supplied to VW could be used to cheat emission tests, but that they were not aware that VW was using them for that purpose, in 11 million cars.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, more stringent and harder to cheat emission tests carried out by consumer group Which? have indicated that 95% of diesel cars are emitting illegal levels of nitrogen oxide and that two-thirds of petrol cars emit illegal levels of carbon monoxide, with one vehicle emitting five times the legal limit, the Hyundai Velostar.

o Royal Mail has been fined £40 million by the French authorities for the participation in an illegal 20-company price-fixing cartel by its parcel subsidiary GLS.

The Autorite de la Concurrence found that secret and unrecorded talks on rigged pricing of parcel services had taken place amongst some members of the powerful French trade association Union des Enterprises de Transport et de Logistics de France (TLF) at TLF meetings between 2004 and 2010. Also fined were TLF members Fedex, fined £12 million, TNT, fined £42 million and DHL, fined £59 million. A total of £489 million in fines was levied on the cartel.

o Energy company npower has been censured by industry regulator Ofgem for billing and complaint handling failures, and has been forced to pay £26 million as a customer redress package. The money will be given to some of npower’s worst-affected customers, and to charity.

Ofgem revealed that npower’s flawed billing procedures between September 2013 and December 2014 generated more than 2 million complaints, which were not dealt with within a reasonable timeframe, and affected more than 500,000 npower customers, with some being dealt with aggressively by npower over disputed payments.

Consumer anger continues to build up over the way that large companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Netflix and Mondelez (owners of Cadbury) can easily, and currently legally manipulate their accounts for their UK operations to pay little or no tax on billions of pounds of profits made here. Paying no corporation tax at all are huge and hugely profitable investment banks such as JP Morgan, Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, Deutsch Bank AG, Nomura Holdings and Morgan Stanley.

In the case of the banks there is a feeling that the sector has already been parasitic enough on the British taxpayer, courtesy of the British government, without grabbing more off them with aggressive tax-avoidance schemes. Continue reading →

Consumers have been warned of the dangers of buying and drinking counterfeit spirits.

Some of the hundreds of thousands of bottles seized by Trading Standards have contained dangerous and potentially lethal substances such as chloroform, which can induce comas, ethyl acetate, used in glues, nail polish removers and cigarettes, and isopronal, an ingredient of car screen-wash and anti-freeze. Continue reading →