MSE News: Investigation launched into claims that pensions data is being sold to crim

EdSwippet

It is a pity the government did not obtain and consult this information before the budget. As a decently sized criminal organization they are clearly eligible to purchase it.

It would have given them a much better projection of how many retirees will be tripped up by the latest LTA reduction than the 4% figure that they apparently pulled out of thin air.

Oblivion

agarnett wrote: »

Don't make us laugh, please. It's too early in the week for such a weak, unbelievably naive and definitely misleading assertion :mad:

I am sitting here putting off a call to one of the biggest insurance company pension providers in the land to ask them at Executive level why they are behaving crookedly. They have been deliberately hiding money belonging to investors in the hope the investors will bail out early, satisfied for example with new pension freedoms designed to loosen cash from the old oak tree before it is ripe, or simply through frustration with the crop declarations of the past few years. Declared performance has deliberately hidden underlying yields which have been secretly harvested and stored behind several consecutive curtains weaved for no other reason than deliberate pension provider obfuscation.

Providers don't care, so long as we don't stay with the original product and intention. Their aim is constantly to shake it up, shake the cash loose from our funds, and shake us out short-changed.

Mortgage Endowment Policy scandals which saw hundreds of thousands of endowment policies surrendered too cheaply were never scams primarily perpitrated by rogue sellers of MEPs. Nor will the feared pension freedom scandals ever prove to be scams primarily perpitrated by rogue sellers of alternative pension products. The biggest scams will be from the insurance industry providers themselves who are hiding the true values of funds and biding their time while the masses are urged to give them up in the false light of the grass being greener over the fence in a myriad of new DIY alternative pension pot receptacles in which we are invited to force our own rhubarb. Doesn't everyone thesedays? And custard with it? Doesn't the cookie crumble that way, too? Be there or be square ?

Crooks are running major parts of the pension provider industry. So many IFAs seem to be blind to it, and that is something I find desperately sad. It is an indication of IFA ingrained reluctance to criticise the same providers they rely upon for a constantly changing portfolio of products which they can then advise upon as alternatives for the masses, but without which they could hardly find two pennies to rub, yet alone earn their next shilling.

As with other long-term investment products that the insurance industry made its name in providing, but in recent decades has decided to ditch, in favour of some diametrically opposite preferred MO based on layers of anonymity and a convenient lack of identity, making them as slippery as soap in pinning down, pension products were always designed to ripen on the vine in the hands of trustworthy constant green-fingered fund farmers. They were proudly sold as such. Give us the seeds. We'll compound with rich compost. Don't touch the fruits until they are ripe. Let the fund managers look after them. They will grow nicely. And so they once did ... in abundance and so temptingly for those entrusted.


Pension products were never meant to be constantly man-handled, plucked off and paid up, dropped down as well as picked up, squeezed, juice extracted, pumped up, contracted out, contracted back in, processed, reprocessed, reattributed, wound-up, reorganised, recharged, financially assisted (emergency respirated), or put into hibernation until terminally reviewed or early surrendered.

There's nothing green-fingered about the industry now. With its now-notorious secret fee-charging regimes it gained the slightly inconvenient reputation as a tad light-fingered. Sadly the unadmitted truth is much heavier than that.

The crims are in plain sight. Keep your eye on the ball everybody.

Best post I've read on here in a long long time. Well said Sir. :T

Loughton_Monkey

dunstonh wrote: »

Possibly. It could come from a firm selling the data (unlikely) or a staff member that has access to records acting fraudulently. Or an ex staff member selling records (I have seen evidence of that in the past) or it could be people pretending to be regulated offering free pension reviews and obtaining the data and selling it on.

Names and phone numbers, certainly.



But I was referring specifically to a system that would by law prevent any current pension provider (regulated) from paying any money whatsoever except under two circumstances.

1. Direct to the customer, under the current pension rules.
2. Or transfer to another regulated provider.

I don't believe that would be difficult, or cumbersome, and surely some of them already notice these things on an ad hoc basis and query them?

dunstonh wrote: »

This is unlikely as PPI was sold by regulated firms/banks. These dodgy pension companies are typically unregulated companies selling unregulated investments using contracts that do not fall under FCA regulation. So, no consumer protection.

People will certainly be scammed but it wont be the within the industry. It will be crims operating outside of the industry.

Again, I was referring to transfers from regulated companies to not regulated companies. All it would take, down the road, is for a class action proving that (whether laws were changed as I suggest, or not) the pension provider was negligent.

You know how things are!

If Scottish Widows transferred a £200K pot of mine to "Con, Ripoff, and Run of Gibralta" even though I authorised them to, I suspect I can plead just as much ignorance as having signed "Yes" for PPI, and the courts would ultimately find them 'guilty'. Especially when my case was the 175th such case they had done that month, all for rather uneducated 67 year old widows....

I would view it as similar to (say) "Execution Only". I sign a form and instruct you to transfer all my 15 ISA funds into Gold EFT's, then I suspect you are legally 'safe'. If, on the other hand, I give you written instructions to get the funds cashed and a cheque drawn to "Con, Ripoff, and Run Savings Bank of Gibralta", I can see circumstances where a court could find you culpable for not having at least queried it and double checked it with me? [I know you personally would anyway]. Along the whole spectrum of things you could do on my 'instructions', I'm sure there's a line over which you could be found legally negligent.

Reaper

agarnett wrote: »

They have been deliberately hiding money belonging to investors in the hope the investors will bail out early

That sounds unlikely. Funds do not make the returns look artificially bad otherwise it would put off new investors.

I am guessing you have something specific in mind. Perhaps a "With Profit" investment where the annual additions are small and the terminal bonus tends to be large?

agarnett

Reaper wrote: »

That sounds unlikely. Funds do not make the returns look artificially bad otherwise it would put off new investors.

New investors? For lucrative "back books" business?? Is that the reason why so many life assurance and investment product businesses and so many now forgotten household names have been merged into Aviva and Friends Life and why even they are merging, to better attract new business? I somehow think not.

I am guessing you have something specific in mind. Perhaps a "With Profit" investment where the annual additions are small and the terminal bonus tends to be large?

What I have in mind is the myriad of wheezes I as just one individual punter have endured from a number of employers and providers which I think I already summed up as[SIZE=-1]

... constantly man-handled, plucked off and paid up, dropped down as well as picked up, squeezed, juice extracted, pumped up, contracted out, contracted back in, processed, reprocessed, reattributed, wound-up, reorganised, recharged, financially assisted (emergency respirated), or put into hibernation until terminally reviewed or early surrendered.

[/SIZE]although I grant you, that might not adequately cover everything I am concerned about in my bankers boxes full of collected pension bumpf!

Reaper

It's hard to respond when there are no specifics. If you are unhappy with your pension you can transfer it. If you move to unit trust type funds that means little is hidden, you simply get the direct growth (or otherwise) in the underlying investments.

You can even go further and move to a SIPP if you feel you have the knowledge to invest directly.

I accept though that many find the subject dull and just hope their current/ex employers scheme is suitable and sufficient.

Reaper

Going back to the original subject I am glad people are waking up to the fact retired people are going to be targeted by scammers, something I have brought up previously.

I dimly remember a proposal that those withdrawing money from their pension would be given advice about scams before they withdrew. I hope that is going ahead. For example:
* as a rule of thumb don't invest with anybody registered abroad (unless you really know what you are doing)
* check the investment firm is registered with the FSA click here (and beware similar sounding names)
* be aware phrases such as "approved for investment in SIPPs" means nothing.
* don't think a company is legitimate just because they have a flashy web site
* if an investment company cold calls you it is a scam. Legitimate companies don't.

and so on.

MSE could do with a list like this on their web site and in the weekly email. I might suggest it.

agarnett

Reaper wrote: »

It's hard to respond when there are no specifics. If you are unhappy with your pension you can transfer it. If you move to unit trust type funds that means little is hidden, you simply get the direct growth (or otherwise) in the underlying investments.

You can even go further and move to a SIPP if you feel you have the knowledge to invest directly.

I accept though that many find the subject dull and just hope their current/ex employers scheme is suitable and sufficient.

I accept that many find that it is far from dull when they discover they are able to control their pensions better if they transfer into something that invests in transparently reported funds with a transparent charging regime, and broadly transparent rights that might follow a common industry pattern.

But we must not forget, or ridicule the greater many, for whom the suggestion they might look into their options to move pensions is as alien to them as a suggestion that they could make money out of matched betting or online poker. They are workers. They believe in working for their living and their retirements, not in manoeuvring with the latest in vogue boxes or platforms of personal financial instruments via their laptops and iPads. They trust that if they honour their labour contract then the government and their employer and any recommended pension provider will honour their duty to safeguard the pension promises and other investments.

So transfers and transparency may be what the fleet of foot and the paid thinking man or woman have achieved for themselves, but the workings of private sector DB schemes are far from transparent and the only "t" word that we are "traditionally" still groomed to rely upon is "trust" (in the trustees and employer). We are now being groomed almost daily in fact to trust no-one else in relation to touching these particular products.

And yet the workings of many traditional personal pension products and wound-up-final-salary-scheme personal buy-out policies are in fact now terribly opaque because they are, as Reaper implied earlier, very often "with-profits" policies which FCA turned a spotlight on, but someone shot out the light.

It was with no surprise that we all learned a year ago that FCA were clearly attempting to hit this particular (and significant) industry sector hard (with-profits fund managers). But they tripped on their own bootlaces by mismanaging the media and it was turned on its head into a story about FCA causing a disorderly market in the shares of the insurance companies they were hoping to hit.

So those companies have basically been let off the hook for a whole year while the media handling debacle played out in front of the Treasury Select Committee, who concluded by slating those at the head of FCA, thus doing wonders for the credibility of the Great British regulatory regime.

I have seen very little that dared suggest that the life insurance industry deserved the disorderly market in its shares. I believe it deserved it, and I believe that any shareholders who lost money shouldn't have been investing in those companies in the first place.

Since 2008 all financial services company shares have been in a false market because the whole industry is supported by hot air - but that's like saying that credibility in UK as a viable economy is supported by nothing other than hot air, so many prefer that we keep schtum on that

I've no doubt it'll be another five years before anyone at the FCA dares make plans to lift the lid on the life assurance industry again! Instead they'll probably just keep moseying along agreeing a bunch of cosily-arrived-at / slap-on-the-wrist type FCA coffer-filling fines and leave it at that.

So how did that particular Treasury Select Committee inquiry actually help us, the fare-paying public? I think it just sent a message that FCA is a poodle and that FCA needs to remember that next time it wakes from any dreams of being a rottweiler.

By the way, what happened to that FCA planned review of the life assurance industry with continuing big questions about with-profits business? Does anyone know ? Was anything published in the end ?

Looking at FCA's Business Plan published 31st March 2014 and then their most recent 2015/16 Business Plan published last week, we can deduce that FCA are now totally unfit for purpose in the arena of with-profits business, and life assurance. They have just kicked the incomplete review down the road.

Over a year ago now they said

We will be reviewing a representative sample of firms who we expect to look at whether they are treating their customers fairly...

...This work will commence in the summer {2014} and we will be speaking to firms about how we can undertake that review.

Really ... and? Well in this year's plan it says that part of last years plan has been "carried forward" (=can kicked down the road?). And on pensions - well, need we really say more?

Yes, do keep a good watch out for those baddies in stripey t-shirts with black eye masks, berets and swag bags over their shoulders who come cold-calling. They may not be who all they claim to be! And meantime, if you should feel that something you don't understand or recognise is rifling your pockets from the inside, don't worry, its probably regulated activity conducted in strict accordance with the latest iteration of some book as interpreted using the very latest government spin/guidance/press release/leak :rotfl:

Reaper

Your posts are long but it is hard to tease out the issues. You say you will soon "call to one of the biggest insurance company pension providers in the land to ask them at Executive level why they are behaving crookedly". If you do get through (I suggest it may be better to ask a question at a shareholder AGM - buy 1 share if you do not own any) then I suggest you run through a short list of concise bullet points. Stick to specifics not generalisations. As soon as you start using extensive fruit metaphors the conversation is likely to come to a swift end.

I will stop posting now and wish you the best of luck in your battle with the industry.

atush

Reaper wrote: »

Going back to the original subject I am glad people are waking up to the fact retired people are going to be targeted by scammers, something I have brought up previously.

I dimly remember a proposal that those withdrawing money from their pension would be given advice about scams before they withdrew. I hope that is going ahead. For example:
* as a rule of thumb don't invest with anybody registered abroad (unless you really know what you are doing)
* check the investment firm is registered with the FSA click here (and beware similar sounding names)
* be aware phrases such as "approved for investment in SIPPs" means nothing.
* don't think a company is legitimate just because they have a flashy web site
* if an investment company cold calls you it is a scam. Legitimate companies don't.

and so on.

MSE could do with a list like this on their web site and in the weekly email. I might suggest it.

How about dont respond to anyone who cold calls you.