London Capital & Finance

jamei305

No response from the site's admin team then yet I see...

Are we allowed to say that London & Capital Finance are devious scammers for example?

Alice_Holt

EnglishMohican wrote: »

Dunstonh must be one of the top 3 or 4 posters on this board and has provided huge amounts of good advice.

This board is the reason for my visits to MSE and the board loses enormous value if Dunstonh's ban remains. It loses value simply from the loss of Dunstonh's words but even more so if we are left to assume that the board is now biased in favour of those who support high risk investment companies and against those who warn of the risks.

I support the restoration of Dunstonh as a major poster on this board.

+1

Poor show MSE

[Deleted User]

verybigchris wrote: »

I feel this issue is more about the rules than the volunteers who enforce them.

The Forum Team are paid members of staff. They aren't "volunteers". I think you are confusing them with Board Guides who can delete spam and move threads etc. The Ban was not enacted by Board Guides.

cbrown372

Very sad....

bowlhead99

jamei305 wrote: »

Are we allowed to say that London & Capital Finance are devious scammers for example?

I would hope not. You do not have any evidence yourself that they are scammers and nobody here has given you any evidence that they are scammers - and so when stating it as fact like that, it is unlikely to be something you can pass off as an opinion you believe to be true in defence of an accusation of libel or slander.

Savvy and knowledgable posters such as Dunstonh, myself and various others have spent plenty of time warning of the risks of unregulated non-tradeable mini-bonds such as the ones offered by LC&F and others, which have appeared on multiple threads on this forum . Such threads have appeared here primarily due to the public's interest being piqued when they are periodically advertised in a misleading way whether by the operators themselves or by people who want to get paid per click for referrals - which they harvest by for example listing them among bank deposit accounts as if they were a comparable product.

The current version of the LC&F website (and various other similar 'opportunities' from other providers do this too) state in their footer or disclaimer that the investments you make into their bonds are not covered by the financial services compensation scheme. And when you apply to make an investment you have to acknowledge that you may lose some or all of your capital. If you have the a basic understanding of the english language and can be bothered reading what you are signing, you can't say that is a 'scam' if you invest and then lose some money. And in any case, you do not claim to even have any actual or anecdotal evidence that people have actually lost money anyhow.

So no, I hope you are not allowed to say they are 'devious scammers'. Freedom of speech necessitates some regulation, libel laws etc to protect parties from such unwarranted attacks even if those parties do not have most altruistic and ethical or morally superior operating models.

One of the reasons that folks here have been disparaging of LC&F is that prior versions of the LC&F promotional websites were (in common with a number of other sites offering similar products) less transparent in admitting that the investments you made were not regulated - which a layperson might have assumed just because they had some level of FCA oversight on some aspects of their activities, and having displayed the FCA registration number on their websites did not do much to counter that assumption. Certain other rival investment bond websites claim to be within the scope of FSCS protection while at least the current LC&F one is clear that as a bond investor you would not be. But clearly, inexperienced investors coming across a website don't always bother with the 'small print' when they have their greedy eyes on a headline rate.

Basically, such an investment is well above the risk profile of a typical UK retail investor who would be better suited to using regulated products such as investment funds. But that doesn't mean you can go around saying it is a scam. As an investment professional, I don't believe Dunstonh outright called it a 'scam' either, and from what I have heard (and what others have posted here) he did not receive a ban for accurately or inaccurately describing the nature of the LC&F 'investment opportunity'. But simply for his disparaging of other posters comments.

As I mentioned on my earlier post on this thread, I support greater transparency in the 'PPR' mechanics because it's clear from some posts in this thread and other dunstonh supportive comments, that some suspect a sinister motive such as protecting certain financial companies or MSE itself from insults, when the rationale might not really be as bad as that, just some more trivial or petty reason.

Being a longstanding member myself, obviosuly I don't support bans of longstanding members for petty or trivial reasons... but at least such 'stupid' reasons are not 'sinister' reasons. If MSE were open and transparent we could at least criticise them for idiotically banning one of 'the good guys'... rather than fearing they had banned him because they didn't like his views on certain commercial businesses or MSE itself.

Anyway, it seems the circumstances behind the ban in this case are being reviewed at a more senior level as confirmed here: http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.php?p=73350213&postcount=67

Sam_J

I thought I would just chip in with a few words of defence for the MSE moderators who instigated the ban. I posted a number of years ago on this forum and also found dunstonh to be an extremely knowledgable poster who gave up much of his time to help people here. But I think most people would probably agree that he could be a little bit difficult at times when in disagreement with other posters and sometimes was quite abrasive. My guess is that he had a similar relationship with the moderators.

I think it is almost certain that dunstonh was not banned for issues in that single thread - evidenced by the fact that other posters took a similar stance and were not banned. It will have been due to a pattern of behaviour over a long period of time. The staff member who took the final decision to ban him probably felt that the value of having him posting on the forum was finally outweighed by the amount of time they had to spend dealing with dunstonh related issues.

SonOf

It often happens that long term regular posters can attract certain people who take pleasure in reporting every single post where "they" believe a line has been crossed. Often not taking much at all for them to report it. So, the board moderation team may see that person's name being reported a lot, and in most cases, for very mild or insignificant things that no-one else is being reported on. So, that person may end up being yellow carded for extremely minor things that no-one is getting carded for and others are doing far worse and getting away with it just because they are reported a lot.

Indeed, we have seen some people post some quite vile stuff aimed at another poster and they just get a warning whilst the mild terse response back from the person targetted has seen them permanently banned or given the two-week ban.

In some cases, you have people going out of their way to provoke a response knowing that the person is going to respond sooner or later. The regular gets a personal stalker. The long-term members of a board rarely report messages due to language/style of posting. So, the person being targetted is unlikely to report but the person doing the targetting will report as soon as they manage to get a response they consider the board team will act on.

The board moderation team don't appear to take those things into account. There has been quite a lot of banning of long term helpful posters in recent times across different sections of the forum which was unjustified and only happened because of the yellow/red card system was applied too arbitrarily and to posts that really did not need carding.

OldMusicGuy

Dunstonh can be a bit terse but he has the patience of a saint. The number of people that come on here asking the same question, along the lines of "I've seen this great investment opportunity, x% return guaranteed, what do you think?", can get a bit frustrating. I haven't been on here long, but the number of first posts along those lines is depressingly high. If dunstonh has been on here for 13 years and is still answering fundamentally the same questions, I'm not surprised sometimes he can be a bit terse.

If that is the reason he has been banned, again the mods need to overlook that and consider the huge value he provided to this forum.

Reaper

Sam_J wrote: »

The staff member who took the final decision to ban him probably felt that the value of having him posting on the forum was finally outweighed by the amount of time they had to spend dealing with dunstonh related issues.

Possibly, but you have to understand the nature of the Savings & Investments board. Here is what happens:
1) Posters ask about whether they should invest in a company that looks too good to be true.
2) Regulars such as dunstonh point out all the things that look dodgy about it
3) The thread comes high in Google searches and the company involved get upset
4) The company threaten legal action against MSE if the thread is not removed. Usually they have no case and are just trying to frighten MSE into deleting the whole thread for the easy life, though the odd poster probably called "scam" when there was insufficient evidence (not dunstonh).
5) MSE contact each poster in the thread they complained about asking if they stand by their posts or retract them.
6) If they stand by the posts and the company continue to threaten their legal advisor has to decide whether to risk going to court or delete them.

The above is VERY time consuming for MSE. All the regulars on the board have been threatened with legal action several times, myself included. Dunstonh more than most simply due to his high post count.

So I can imagine somebody complaining about one of his posts, somebody at MSE checking and seeing he was costing them a lot of time and deciding it was easiest to get rid of him.

The trouble is we NEED to be able to tell novice investors if we think the scheme is either a scam or highly risky, as in the case of this unregulated mini-bond. So if the rest of us face the same fate it means from now on when that novice investor asks about putting his life savings into something we can see is not what it claims to be what do we do? Say "no comment"?

TrustyOven

Reaper wrote: »

The trouble is we NEED to be able to tell novice investors if we think the scheme is either a scam or highly risky, as in the case of this unregulated mini-bond. So if the rest of us face the same fate it means from now on when that novice investor asks about putting his life savings into something we can see is not what it claims to be what do we do? Say "no comment"?

Would we be allowed to reply with "We cannot say anything as COMPANY_X is possibly highly likely to take legal action against anyone criticising them or their products. You need to decide very carefully whether you want to invest in such a company that wants to stifle balanced discussion and enforce censorship."?