Whenever there’s a crisis in the world the fraudsters wake up big time! This current pandemic is no difference. Insolvency, debt, closures, stock clearances, company sales, you name it, if you’re a company you will be receiving a ton of these emails.

Most of the time you ignore, delegate to junk and delete, sometimes though it’s worth investigating who the fraudsters are and how they can have legitimate companies. Next time I wish to come back as an investigative journalist. I would love to do that work, but for now I only did a few tap, tap, click, click and discovered the small minded fraudsters.

Below is the text of the unsolicited email I received today from helpline@companyinsolvencyadvice.co.uk

“YEAR 2021 AND YOUR BUSINESS

Has your business been severely affected by the pandemic and cannot continue to cover its costs?

Have you had to shut the doors and you don’t know what you are entitled to?

Have your customers disappeared because of troubles of their own?

Have the furlough schemes and government grants helped but are just delaying the tough decisions you are going to have to make?

Is it time to reassess the way forward?

Here at Company Insolvency Advice we help companies find answers and solutions to business problems that have come about unexpectantly.

This email is not designed to sell you something you don’t need — it is designed to let you know that there is a company that can help answer your questions.

Company Insolvency Advice is often used by the directors of small to medium sized businesses who are looking to discuss situations with someone who is totally independent. In the same way we do not know you so we have no pre-conceived ideas of what has gone wrong.

Below are some areas that we specialise in helping companies with:

Directors and Employee redundancy claims
Bounce back loan / CBILS.
Business closure and options available to you.
Late HMRC payments
Court enforcement proceedings
Receipt of Winding Up Petitions

If you have any questions or want to discuss anything with us, please call either Robert Cooksey or Luke Palmer on the numbers below.

All calls are confidential.

Kind regards

Robert Cooksey and Luke Palmer — 0800 999 0666 / 07884430152"

They even kindly added their personal names and phone numbers. So that’s easy let’s look these names up on LinkedIn, tap, tap, tap, boom!

So no mention of Company Insolvency Advice on their LinkedIn profiles. They are using another website to direct to the real company ‘Bridgstones’. Same physical addresses for both companies, as displayed on the websites.

Bridgestones —

https://bridgestones.co.uk

Company Insolvency Advice —

https://companyinsolvencyadvice.co.uk

It just gives you the feeling these guys Robert Cooksey and Luke Palmer are up to something suspicious, why email out using a different company, when your speciality is insolvency. It has an air of scam and fraud about it for me. I have reported the unsolicited email to the UK Information Commissioners Office and send the email header to their email service sparkpost.com who have been acquired by messagebird.com.

On the bottom of their websites it states, ‘Designed and Built by Piranha Digital’ and when you click on that it just goes straight back to their website. Maybe a Freudian Slip, the word ‘Piranha’, because that’s exactly what they are a shoal of Piranhas!

Reporting spam to the mail clients sometimes feels pointless but at least with this one I felt I received a satisfying response.

“Hello,

Thank you for this report. We have taken action against this account.

Respectfully,

The SparkPost Abuse Team”