ProSearch Scam

CashStrapped

devliciously_me wrote: »

When Prosearch are involved, ALWAYS go straight to Equiniti

Equiniti Limited, Aspect House, Spencer Road, Lancing, West Sussex, BN99 6DA.
Ask them to update your shareholder record and release all monies due to you. Please note that dividends ( which make up most unpaid monies) are a debt owed to you by the company. This money should be issued free of all cost. Equiniti may try to charge you to obtain you own cash but they use a technicality in charging for a tax statement attached to the payment.

If you dont have, and need, a new share certificate, as for a Letter of Indemnity from Equiniti. There will be a fee for this. Some exceptions to the rule are where a company, such as banco Santander, do not issue share certificates or your holding is in a nominee account.

If you have changed address- send proof. if you dont have proof, dont worry- and dont be bullied into using Prosearch. You will have a record of a previous dividend payment on an old bank statement ( so will Equiniti- get them to check theirs- that would be fun!!!!!), you probably have an old certificate or tax counterfoil. Alternatively, and importantly, if prosearch have already found you and are satisfied that you are the right person, and Equiniti own Prosearch

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well it would seem reasonable to encourage them to check your credentials by using the information already collected about you without your consent, wouldnt it???

In some cases, Equiniti have told people that they MUST use Prosearch. This advice is clearly wrong. The responsibility for the management of a share register rests with the company in which you own shares and/or its registrar- not with some 3rd party company that happens to be owned by the registrar.
If you are told this, make representations directly to the company secretary of the company in which you own shares. The company should take such practices extremely seriously. Also, in some circumstances ( if your shares are held in a nominee account) consider making a complaint to the Financial Conduct Authority

Hello, I received a letter from prosearch regarding unpaid dividends. Being aware of the costs/pitfall of using prosearch, I went direct to Equiniti.

However, Equiniti still wish to charge a 12.50 admin fee. As my dividend is only a tiny £38, this is nearly 1/3 of the amount dure to me! Despite the small amount, I do not really find this acceptable.

Going by the above information, am I correct that Equiniti should not really be charging me anything? Looking back in my records, I found the tax certificate stub for the dividend in question. I must have misplaced the cheque somehow(the only one out of all my dividends). Yet, according to the above, if I have the stub, Equiniti should not try to apply a fee. Have I understood this correctly?

Seronera

I've got one of these letters. Its all very odd as its to do with my late fathers estate and they have correctly put his old address as the registered owner, then sent the letter, again correctly addressed to me, my brother and sister as executors of the estate. As far as I'm aware a grant of probate was lodged with them nearly ten years ago with instructions to deal with the executors.

They had our address then, so why is it suddenly worth 12.5% to have 'found' us all over again. When you bear in mind that those good old life insurance salesmen generally earned 5% gross commission for selling an investment bond, or 3% for a Unit Trust after their travel and report writing costs, it does seem to me that 12.5% is a ruddy high charge, but it probably reflects the high number of low value transactions where they have to charge a proportionately high fee.

I don't know where the dividends went either as all the others have been received by the executors. Its all a bit 'niffy' but as others say, probably entirely within the law. Just another little sideline that generates a nice steady income stream for swapping data,,,hmmmmm.

I also note that if you sign it, you have 'irrevocably appointed Prosearch as agent in processing this claim" Hmmm. Thats neat too. Think I'l do some digging and hit the phone to Equiniti.

djd1962

My father received two of these last week relating to HBOS and Lloyds. One was for £761 and the other for £60 which are supposedly entitlements of my Mother who died in 1999. On the face of it, £820 minus their fee looks quite attractive, but having read the posts on here, then I am tempted to call Equiniti directly. But can anyone tell me what our options are should they refuse to deal with the matter? If this money IS genuinely owed to my Dad, then legally what are his rights to claim it back. The deadline on both letters is May 18th

Sir_Lunchalot

The deadline is just to 'encourage' you to fill in the form before their contract expires. If the money is owed to you by the company Equiniti cannot decline to deal with it. If they try, write to the Company Secretary of Lloyds and he or she will put them back in their box pretty quickly.

simonm_3

I'm sitting on yet another reminder from prosearch about a £16.56 outstanding dividend. I actually phoned them up to ask what the 12.5% referred to, the call centre staff person said it was just taken from the £16,50. I still don't trust them an inch ! Especially after reading all this. Has anybody else used the claim form for £16.56 for International power shares, I imagine this is a fairly typical amount. This is what Santander say: http://www.shareview.co.uk/4/Info/Portfolio/santanderhelp/en/home/shareholders/Pages/ProSearch.aspx

nobblybobbly147

Received a letter from them last week advising that my grandfather has unclaimed entitlements and that they are trying to trace him. He died almost 18 years ago so can anyone advise what I need to do? I have no desire to pay the fees that I've read about on here and am happy to do as much work as possible, just need some pointers in the way to begin. The letter states the following:


Dear Mr ..........
ProSearch has been appointed by a major corporation to locate the following person(s) in connection with unclaimed entitlements


Mr ...............................


As you share the sane surname we wonder if you might be related to this person?


It then goes on to ask me to forward a correspondence address to them.

shelster

Sorry if I'm missing the point here, but the general advice here seems to be that if you've received a letter from Prosearch, you should instead call Equiniti, as the share register, in order to avoid Prosearch's "admin" fees. Again, if I understand correctly from the posts here, Equiniti is then obligated to tell you if any dividends are due to you and release them (?) Can someone please confirm that's correct?

But if Equiniti and Prosearch are part of the same company (and my Prosearch letter does say it's a subsidiary of Equiniti), then isn't Equiniti by default as suspect as Prosearch?

(I'm here b/c my husband received one of the Prosearch letters saying that he was due a £229.50 "dividend entitlement" from Alliance & Leicester shares now acquired by Santander.)

Thanks for any clarification.

Le_Kirk

I received one of the ProSearch letters via my Mum (I look after her financials) and wrote to Equiniti, asking them a) if ProSearch were indeed working on their behalf and b) since the thrust of the letter (about a £3.17 dividend) was that they could not contact Mother, how were ProSearch able to simply write to Mother at the address registered with Equiniti who had previously managed to send (and were still sending) dividends for other shares without problems for a number of years. I did not receive satisfactory answers (waffle mainly) but Mum did get her dividend (then and since) and we did not pay anything to ProSearch.

Sally_Hale

I have received a letter from these people but in the letter it states that they are a subsidiary of Equiniti. It also offers you the option to give the money to Children in Need for no fees! I am still going to contact Equaniti direct as my dividend, when I had the shares, was paid by direct debit!

Anyone else had one with this info in it?

shelster

By way of followup to my earlier post (#89), I took the advice offered here and called Equiniti rather than ProSearch. However, Equiniti claimed that they have sent three cheques to our address that weren't cashed -- and that they would deduct £40.00 from the total they owed us! I find it utterly impossible to believe that they have sent three cheques to us that just disappeared, especially given that they were able to send us quite a few letters from ProSearch. In addition, our address details were correct all along.

We ended up accepting this, and have been issued a cheque for the dividends (less the £40.00). This just seems like the perfect scam - we have no way of proving whether Equiniti ever sent the cheques in the first place, but they just made £40 by claiming we're at fault for not cashing the cheques.

I wrote Santander to complain and got a letter back simply saying they aren't responsible for the "non-encashment" of cheques. If I can find the time, I'm writing the Financial Ombudsman.