It has recently emerged that the Department for Work and Pensions knew about the fraud allegations at the company a month before he appointed her to that position and that, following her appointment, the DWP awarded the company five contracts to run Work Programmes throughout the country.

Liam Byrne, shadow work and pensions secretary, has asked his counterpart Iain Duncan Smith to tell him when the government knew of the allegations and whether they had any impact on negotiations on the Work Programme contracts with A4e.

So, what did the government know and when? Mrs Harrison has since left the company and has resigned from her post with the government, but the questions concerning the government’s relationship with the company will not go away.

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Problems are often found upon trying to sell a timeshare, which is renowned for being extremely difficult. Craig Williams and his wife bought into a complex in Scotland and gave £500 to a firm, Yacht Trading, when trying to sell their share. However, the company did not repay the money after it failed to sell and was later wound up after a government investigation.

Williams was contacted again, this time by a company known as Asset Accountancy Services (AAS), which claimed to have a total of £4.5m available to refund people who had lost out in the Yacht Trading scam. However, this proved to be another scam and, if Williams had not been alert to it, it could have cost him another £500 at least.

A spokesman for the Timeshare Association says that companies, such as AAS are often firms involved in the original mis-selling who are now reinventing themselves as legal recovery specialists and this is how they have the contact details of their targets. So, beware fraud and mis-selling in timeshare!

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The Financial Services Authority (FSA) has said that while there has been a 19% increase in the number of inquiries about this type of fraud in the last year, those who have actually invested in them have fallen by 7%.

The practice refers to share fraudsters, known as boiler rooms, who contact people by phone and pressurise them into purchasing shares which turn out to be worthless as they are non-tradable, overpriced or even non-existant. The boiler rooms themselves often operate from outside the UK but have false UK addresses.

The FSA says that it is encouraging that the amount of people who have lost money in this way appears to be falling. It says it hopes this means that its warnings are getting through and that people are now better prepared when they are cold-called out of the blue.

Do you think you have been a victim of a possible boiler room scam or have you been called and been fully prepared for them? Let me know your experiences of this type of fraud.

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Boiler Room Scam2

The figures, which come from Experian, the credit agency, claim that 49 in every 10,000 mortgage applications were fraudulent in the third quarter of last year, 55% up on the second quarter and 77% up on the same period in 2010. It seems that many of these arise from individuals who have misrepresented their financial situation to try and buy property that would ordinarily be out of their reach.

Any lies that are put onto an application form in this way constitute mortgage fraud, so it is any situation where there is an intent to materially misrepresent or omit information on an application to obtain a loan or to get a loan bigger than would have been the case if the lender had known the full truth.

Though the most severe cases, where millions of pounds are involved, will result in custodial sentences, in offences of the type already described, where there is perhaps an exaggeration on an application form, it may not result in a charge and obviously not a prison sentence, though it is still a serious offence and will harm that person s ability to secure a mortgage in the future.

We d like to hear from anyone working in this area or who has perhaps been affected by mortgage fraud in some way. We look forward to hearing from you.

The fraud was committed by Shanaz Hussain during a divorce in which she forged her husband s signature on some important documents which secured the transfer of the matrimonial home from his name into hers.

The jury at Preston Crown Court found Hussain guilty of seven offences of fraud and she was sentenced to a 12-month prison sentence suspended for two years and 300 hours community service. Judge Christopher Cornwall said that Hussain had acted wholly uncharacteristically in carrying out the offences and that she had behaved in the way she had, mainly because of the acrimonious divorce following a 20-year marriage.

As well as forging her former husband s signature on a financial declaration and Land Registry documents, she also forged the signature of a Blackburn solicitor as a witness. Hussain had served as a magistrate on the Burnley, Pendle and Rossendale bench for six years.

Possibly in the case of the Spurs manager it may not have been quite so taxing, because he is a well-known character and the press coverage was so intense, so losing interest may not have been an issue, but could it be in those cases where the defendant is not so well known and his financial affairs are so complex?  Maybe so, but it is worth remembering that the prosecution do have some weapons in their armoury to try and ensure that the jury members stay with them through to the end of the trial.

They provide the jury with ample time to adequately explore the issues involved, perhaps including clear, graphic evidence and HMRC now have more sophisticated charts and graphs which help make the complex issues appear more manageable.

Also, perhaps the notion that it is too complex a subject is insulting to most jurors who, whatever their intellectual capabilities, tend to apply themselves to the job in hand to ultimately deliver a verdict they can be satisfied with.

The last month or so have seen stories of individual jurors calling in sick when they weren’t, researching a defendant on the internet or refusing to go back because a case was boring . However, I believe these are isolated cases and most jurors are dedicated and work hard to try and deliver justice. Is that your experience too? Let me know, I d like to hear from you.

The total amount for 2011 was calculated at over 3.5bn with one rogue trader case which was not identified, worth 1.3bn and KPMG said that the year had been an extraordinary one for fraudsters with the economic downturn acting, in some cases, as a catalyst for more fraud to be perpetrated.

The findings tally with another report, this time published by the UK s Fraud Prevention Service, which reported a 9% rise in overall fraud last year, with identity fraud rising by 10% while there was a 13% increase in the fraud of an account or financial policy which had been lawfully obtained but was then used without the owner s permission.

The Serious Fraud Office said that it was prosecuting more cases that involved increasingly more defendants. Do you have any experience of fraud and do you also believe it is increasing in occurrence? We d like to hear from you.

Dynamics Inc have produced a credit card, powered by a tiny battery, which produces a different security code every time it is switched on while the number in the magnetic strip also changes. The owner of the card switches it on by entering a PIN code and it then displays a number without which it can’t be used.

The company also says that when the card is “off” the magnetic strip shows the old number rather than the new one, so it can’t be “skimmed” illegally, in a restaurant for example. The card is currently being trialled by Citibank.