TONY HETHERINGTON: Number plate firm Click4Reg took eight months to shell out my £150
Tony Hetherington is Financial Mail on Sunday’s ace investigator, fighting readers corners, revealing the truth that lies behind closed doors and winning victories for those who have been left out-of-pocket. Find out how to contact him below.
Driven to distraction: Click4Reg went at the speed of a tranquillised tortoise
A.M. writes: I have had the misfortune to deal with Click4Reg Ltd. I put my car number plate up for sale with them, and last May they advised me it had been sold for GBP150.
Since then, they have failed to pay me.
They blamed the DVLA until I discovered the plate had been transferred on to a car months ago.
Then they said they had problems with their phones. Finally, they said their payment system had failed.
Tony Hetherington replies: On May 10 last year, Click4Reg wrote from its offices in St Leonards-on-Sea, in East Sussex, congratulating you on the sale of your licence plate.
There was a transfer form for you to complete, and the assurance that, ‘Shortly upon successful transfer of ownership, a member of our team will contact you to confirm that your payment cheque has been sent.’
You sent back the completed form, and weeks later in July, Click4Reg told you the transfer was ‘still going through with the DVLA’. It added that as soon as the transfer was confirmed, it would ‘release’ your GBP150 – suggesting that Click4Reg had already been paid by the buyer.
In November, you reminded the company that you were still waiting for your payment.
It replied that ‘our telephone line is down due to maintenance’. Shortly after that, Click4Reg wrote that ‘our whole payments system is down’. It added: ‘Please rest assured we have our whole team working around the clock to get this sorted as soon as possible.’
And days before Christmas, an email told you that ‘we are currently waiting for a further response from our providers’.
But here’s a funny thing.
An online review from another customer who was expecting a payment from Click4Reg says: ‘Latest excuse is that their system is down!’ And that was last May, so does this mean the company has suffered the same failure for six months?
And here is another online review: ‘Just got a call (November 22) to tell me systems down since this morning’. This morning? So did the round-the-clock team get things going again, only for them to collapse once more?
So what is the problem with Click4Reg? Well, one problem is that its most recent accounts say that it is owed more than GBP1 million. Who owes all this cash?
Unnamed ‘associates’ of Click4Reg, that’s who. In a nutshell, Click4Reg has lent loads of cash to people or companies – all connected to it – while failing to pay its own customers.
A bit more digging showed that Click4Reg is run by Elie Fakhoury. He also ran a separate company called The Sussex Exchange Limited, until it went bust last July, owing GBP1.85 million.
And among that huge debt, there is GBP830,462 owed to Click4Reg. And this is not his only troubled business. He also runs another Sussex company, Fakhoury Group Limited, which has an unsatisfied court judgment against it for GBP714.
I put all this to Mr Fakhoury and invited his comments.
He did not reply, but one of his staff told me: ‘Unfortunately, during the upgrade of our server security measures, we experienced some loss and errors in classification data. As a result, we are required to manually match each order with its corresponding transaction ID and payments. This process has inevitably caused delays.’
Your own wait is over though.
After the string of excuses going back eight months, Click4Reg told me payment was on its way, and a few days ago you confirmed you had received your GBP150.
Nobody could accuse Click4Reg of hogging the fast lane, but going at the speed of a tranquillised tortoise deserves more than an apology, so it has added GBP50 on top.
WE’RE WATCHING YOU
‘President’: Richard Maude
Officers from the Serious Fraud Team at Essex Police have closed down their investigation into allegations against foreign exchange investment firm CashFX and its promoters.
In 2020, I warned the company, which is based in Panama, was using a team of UK recruiters to attract British investors who were told: ‘CashFX has always paid a daily return of between 2 per cent and 3 per cent, which is capped at 15 per cent passive income each week; this is from trading which is done on your behalf – you can literally set it up and forget it.’
CashFX marketed training manuals explaining currency trading, but recruits say the emphasis was always on trusting the scheme’s experts to trade for them. Essex-based Richard Maude, who holds the title of ‘President’ in CashFX, said: ‘If you are someone who just wants to be a passive member and earn from the trading, that’s where the money is coming from. It’s coming from the trading results the company is getting.’
However, many investors found that while it was easy to join the scheme and deposit money, it was far less easy to make withdrawals, even when their account showed big paper profits.
The scheme operated internationally and investors’ claim losses run into hundreds of millions of pounds.
Operating a currency trading investment scheme requires authorisation from the Financial Conduct Authority. Neither CashFX nor its UK personnel were licensed by the FCA, which issued a public warning on its website, telling investors to be ‘especially wary of dealing with this unauthorised firm’.
However, Essex Police has now told victims of CashFX: ‘We have completed numerous enquiries and at this time we are not aware, nor is there any prima facie evidence to support allegations that anyone in the UK has committed criminal offences.’ Police added simply that the scheme’s ethics were ‘questionable’.
Victims who have contacted The Mail on Sunday point out that operating a currency trading scheme without authorisation is itself a criminal offence.
And if CashFX was not, in fact, a currency trading scheme, then its promoters were using false claims to defraud investors, which is also a crime. Enquiries by regulators and police are continuing in the US, where there are also many victims.
If you believe you are the victim of financial wrongdoing, write to Tony Hetherington at Financial Mail, 9 Derry Street, London W8 5HY or email [email protected].
Because of the high volume of enquiries, personal replies cannot be given.
Please send only copies of original documents, which we regret cannot be returned.