Wine Futures BWC Management et al

Col_Jessop

Hi All,

A word of caution regarding cold calls from companies trying to sell you en primeur (wine futures) as an investment opportunity.

I did some research after a cold call from BWC Management. The nature of the call itself raised suspicion; however as even when challenged on where they got my data from that is when the alarm bells really started to ring. They still have not identified the data broker.

Whilst digging into BWC Management I quickly identified that the current director already has a fraud conviction and was struck off along with a fellow director for running guess what a wine futures company called Boington & Fredericks. From the Standard article in full further on - "Some of the fraudsters involved in these drinks scams have been imprisoned. Indeed, the pair who set up Boington & Fredericks - Frederick Achom and Anthony Grant - had already served time for previous fraud."

From there the background to wine futures gets worse. An ex-employee of Grants set up their own company. Including the ex-employee was convicted of fraud - reports talk of £2.5M defrauded from investors and the investments being spent of cars, holidays and even cocaine.

https://www.decanter.com/wine-news/bordeaux-fraudster-convicted-37557/

Just Googling Bordeaux Wine and fraud comes up with all manner of scandals and convictions and bans for Directors. Here's another:

https://www.decanter.com/wine-news/wine-fraud-banned-director-jailed-after-million-pound-con-268940/

According to the DTI in the Standard there has been over £110M duped from investors.
https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/restaurants/wine-scam-costs-investors-110m-6326500.html

Interestingly one of the directors convicted in the £2.5M scam is now a data broker and has his ICO registration number. These are the people buying and selling your personal data to companies cold calling owned by directors that already have convictions for fraud in the very same line of business. Beggars belief that there are no checks in place on who can set up as a data broker and buy, sell, rent our personal data to convicted fraudsters.

There is a remarkable body of work on the fraudulant activities of the above companies and even more in this line of business. Well worth a read if you are considering investing in wine futures:
http://www.investdrinks.org/


If you get cold called by any company you do not know - firstly do not under any circumstances engage with them beyond identifying where they got your data from. Ensure you data is suppressed and contact the data broker that supplied your data to find out what data they hold and ensure it is not sold and that anyone it was sold to is blocked from utilising it again. Protect yourselves from companies like those above who are fuelled by data brokers making money out of your personal data.

Malthusian

I read through investdrinks.org's front page. Among the very good advice (none of which will be revelatory to most of the regulars on this forum), I particularly liked

Drink investments should never be your main investment. Do not invest more than you can afford to drink if it does not work out.

This is a much better variant of the moronic scammer's mantra "Don't invest more than you can afford to lose".

Quite amazing that much of investdrink.org's content is from 2000 or earlier, and yet absolutely nothing has changed. The same old scams are doing the same old scamming.