Q113 Dean Russell: Mr Lewis, you talked about mental health earlier, which is an area I am incredibly passionate about. I wanted to get a sense of the actual impact of this on real people. Often, as has been said just now in the evidence, it is not just a financial harm. It is a harm to people’s lives. Could you give us some examples, please, of the damage this actually does?
Martin Lewis: It is probably worth starting, if you will forgive me, by explaining the way they tend to operate before I talk about the mental health harm. We are talking about online safety, but this is not only an online issue. It is an offline issue, too. The online scam ads are the departure point. They are not the destination. What tends to happen is that you respond to one of these adverts, and then you get somebody calling you up who says, “Hi, this is a great investment. It’s recommended by me or Richard Branson, or Deborah Meaden or whomever else, and they absolutely guarantee that you will not lose money in it. This is fantastic. All we need to start is £250”. They get the £250. Sometimes, there is a fake web portal showing people how well their investment is doing. By the way, something else that is scammed, it is worth noting, is bitcoin. Bitcoin is used like my name is used. This is not about bitcoin. There is no underlying bitcoin investment. Bitcoin is “Get rich quick” to some people, so they think that they are getting part of the bitcoin train. It is not about bitcoin. Then you get another call, “It’s going so well. Would you like to put some more in? You see how well it’s done. You’ve now got £1,000. How about giving us £1,000 this time?” That train continues. Then you get to the point when you start to get worried and you want your money out. How do you get your money out? “You’re going to need to give us £10,000 to get your money out”. People become brainwashed and trapped by these forms of scams. You have to add to the mental harm the feeling of being duped. This is not all vulnerable people. Solicitors, university lecturers and accountants get trapped into it. I will give you one case study.
A lady who had bladder cancer invested money earmarked for her granddaughter’s wedding because she wanted it to go a bit further. She said, in touch with me, “If Martin is sponsoring it, it must be all right”. It was a scam and she lost tens of thousands. She lost £15,000 trying to get back the money initially lost. I heard the story of a grandmother whose grandchild’s parents had died, and the money that the parents had put in for the grandchild she put into a scam because she trusted me. If you wonder why I get so passionate, it is because I have spent 20 years trying to do consumer protection work. I see people’s lives being destroyed. You cannot factor that in. It is not just people losing money. If you have just given away your retirement fund that you worked 30 years for, and you feel stupid—they are not stupid, but they feel stupid because these are really sophisticated and clever people; if only they used their talents for better reasons—you do not recover from that in years.
You do not recover from that in life. You spend your life walking along the road kicking yourself up the backside for how you have destroyed your life. I find it deeply frustrating to be told, “Well, we need to do some research on this, and we might get a fix in a couple of years”. We have copious research at the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute. We will send you the research on that, the numbers and the cases of difficulty. I mentioned before—it was not flippant—that people take their own life, or consider it, because they blame themselves for the scam that they have fallen for. I do not blame them. You will forgive me, but I blame legislators and regulators who do not put enough practices in place. I blame online platforms who do not deny the oxygen of publicity to the people who are doing the adverts. Of course, I blame the criminals themselves. They are criminals and I have given up on the idea that we are going to get the police to catch those criminals. That would be the best solution, but, if nothing else, we need to try to stop them getting access to vulnerable people. That is what this Bill can do.
Dean Russell: Thank you, Mr Lewis. That is incredibly powerful testimony. I appreciate you sharing it. I can tell that it is very hard to do so as well. Rocio, would you mind sharing your experiences of the real, actual impact of this and the harm it does?
Rocio Concha: We have a number of case studies. I can read you some of them. Andrew was a retired social worker. He saw an investment. When he did his research, it was endorsed by Piers Morgan. He lost £100,000 of his life savings. He attended a suicide prevention appointment because of the stress he was facing. He was prescribed antidepressants, betablockers and tranquillisers. Let me tell you about another case. A man who was retiring in his 70s lost £100,000 to a bitcoin scam. He said to us, “Being scammed in this way was utterly devastating. I think about it virtually every day, and it has really affected my confidence and my ability to make decisions. It has changed the person that I am”. I want to share another case. This is a lady, a sound engineer in her 40s. She was searching for an investment and advice on Google. She ended up losing £30,000. She said, “It has been really traumatic. At the time it felt like no one cared or wanted to discuss my case with me. It breaks you as a human being and leaves you scared of the outside world”. As Martin was saying, it is clear that it is not only about the financial impact. It is also the emotional impact that people are facing because of these scams. They blame themselves. I completely agree with Martin 10 that, actually, the criminals are very sophisticated. It is easy to believe why these things look so real. You cannot blame the victims.
Dean Russell: Can I assume that in those cases they never recovered their money? Would that be a correct assumption?
Rocio Concha: I would need to check whether they recovered it, but if they recovered that money, it was not from the criminals or the online platform. It was not because the banks recovered the APP scams. The rules are there. The banks may have paid some of them, but I will check. It is not because the online platforms are returning the money. It is not because they catch the criminals and then return the money. As Martin says, it is very difficult to catch these criminals.
Dean Russell: Thank you for your testimony.
