Derek is about to give a fraudster £10,000. It will take his bank six weeks to stop him

“Hayley, I hear what you’re saying and accept it. But if you said to me, ‘On a scale of one to ten, how confident are you that you are dealing with decent people?’ I would say ten.”

Back to square one. It takes another six weeks, a visit from the police and three hours of phone calls before Derek is prepared to finally accept that he had been duped. He actually has to say the words, “I know this is a scam,” and only then can the bank unfreeze his three accounts.

You can hear extracts from these calls here today and they show the huge effort it can often take to convince normally rational and cautious savers that they are being manipulated and coerced by criminals.

During Derek’s calls he is always calm, but frustrated. Other victims can become aggressive and indignant, and some resort to swearing at service staff whose only job is to try to stop them losing money.

“People are usually shocked that their bank can step in like this,” said Hayley, who has been working in Santander’s fraud department since 2017, and is now part of the specialist Break the Spell team. She was trained by the police to tease vital information out of customers who have been socially engineered for weeks into thinking that they are dealing with genuine businesses.

By the point she speaks to them many will have already lost money (even if they don’t yet realise this) and usually have had their account blocked as a precaution.

Hayley said: “They think, ‘This is my money, and I can do what I want with it’ and, when they are so convinced and they’ve already made their decision, it can be hard to talk them round. I understand and try to sympathise, but it can be very upsetting. You look at them and think, ‘That could be my neighbour or a family member’.”

Derek’s tale begins in March when he was sent an email news story. He had been wary of spam messages and pop-up adverts but this one caught his eye.

“The story said that Gordon Ramsay had made money from this new investment called ‘bitcoin system’ and that he had gone on TV to talk about it,” Derek said. “It said they gave Holly Willoughby £250 on live TV and, within minutes, she had doubled her money. Reading that, I just thought it has to be worth a try.”

Derek searches for Solid Invest, the firm mentioned in the story, then rings the number listed on its website.

He is told there was a minimum investment of £250, so he pays in £400. The next day a broker named Natalia calls to talk through his investments, which she says would be mostly in cryptocurrencies but also oil and gold.

Natalia and her colleague Mel then phone him every day and gave him access to Solid Invest’s online trading platform. After two weeks it shows that his money has more than doubled. Derek, a former sales manager, invests £2,000 more via the online platform Luno.

“My investments were going up,” said Derek, a former sales manager. “To be honest, I was very happy with the whole thing. I was elated.”

On March 30 Mel calls, saying she is excited about an opportunity for him to buy bitcoin at a very reduced price. Derek thinks it sounds too good to be true, but is already under the spell. He tries to send £10,000 and is on the line to Mel when he has a text from Santander, saying that the bank has concerns about the payment.

“I told Mel the bank had texted me, and she said not to tell them that the money was for investments because the banks don’t like that kind of thing,” said Derek.

Minutes later Santander’s fraud department calls for the first time. When asked what the money was for, Derek says he is transferring money to his wife. Santander refuses to authorise the payment.

“I was seething. I felt like the bank was not trusting my judgment. I’m not a teenager, I’m 73. I’ve lived through a lot of things,” he said.

“Santander was making decisions not based on the full story and preventing me from doing what I wanted to do. And at the end of the day, it’s my money.”

It is at this point that Derek is passed to the Break the Spell team and Hayley calls. She gets Derek to describe how he first became involved with Solid Invest.

He explains that he is a regular investor and normally cautious. “I’m savvy. I’m 73, but I’m not stupid. I get emails that are quite clearly scams of some description. You know, the URL is wrong. I’m not that bigheaded, that I’m too clever not to get scammed.”

Hayley then starts to break down the red flags in Derek’s story. But for everything she highlights as suspicious, he has an answer. When she asks why he has to transfer money to Luno, Derek says it was because he was converting money into dollars. When she points out that he had allowed the firm remote access to his computer, he says he could see the cursor moving at all times on his screen so he knew what they were doing. Victims are often unknowingly coached by criminals to have answers for bank security checks.

The more Hayley unpicks Derek’s story, the more it becomes clear that he had at times felt uncomfortable with Solid Invest. He says: “I have had occasional question marks — the very first thing they asked was how much money have you got to invest? I said nothing. Nothing at all — all the money belongs to my wife.” Derek had also told them that his wife was disabled and bedridden and that he was her main carer.

After almost an hour on the call, Hayley says: “We are near enough adamant that this is a scam and will lead you to financial loss, so your bank account with us at the moment is restricted. Until you say yes, you believe this is a scam, or no, here is all the supporting documents that show it’s genuine, your account will remain restricted. Are you happy to say this is a scam, and you’re happy for us to report it, or not?”

Derek pauses. “Well, I’m . . . no, I can’t, Hayley. I can’t agree to say that I’m happy that it is a scam.”

The wording is crucial.

When Hayley calls a week later, Derek tries to bargain. He promises not to send any more money to the firm. But he still won’t agree it was a scam, so his accounts stay blocked.

Over the next two weeks, Derek continues to battle the bank. He visits his local branch to provide what he thinks is evidence to prove the firm is legitimate, but he has no luck convincing the fraud team.

Finally, Santander sends the police round to his house to see if their intervention will finally convince him. However, it just makes him cross.

“I wasn’t happy with the bank at all,” said Derek afterwards. “Sending the police round when I’ve already told them I was fine to make the investments. I was getting very wound up.”

On April 20th, two weeks after the second call, Hayley tries for a third time. For an hour they went over the facts again, but Derek still won’t admit it was a scam.

“I thought I would be able to convince him this time,” Hayley said later. “There was no hope at this point. He would not admit it.”

What Hayley does not realise was that the seeds of doubt had been sown. When Solid Invest calls she asked to withdraw £3,000, but the brokers refuse, saying he had signed up to a “long-term investment”.

Natalia and Mel start to miss their scheduled phone calls, leaving him waiting by the phone. He wrote an angry email, complaining about the declining levels of service and raising concerns he thought the company might be fraudulent.

When Natalia misses their next call, he writes to them again, threatening to go to the bank. There was no reply, and finally the penny drops.

“I felt like a silly old sod,” said Derek. “We all know scammers are very clever, otherwise they would not be effective, but I did feel foolish. Had Hayley not put the possibility into my head, I might never have realised it was a scam.”

On May 18, six weeks after their first conversation, he calls Santander and asks to speak to Hayley.

“I need to get on bended knees and say, ‘I’m so sorry’,” he says. “You were right. I was wrong.”

The FCA issued an alert about Solid Invest in October 2020 and requested the website be taken down. It has had a number of complaints about the company.

Solid Invest was approached for comment.