Two men have been imprisoned for conning vulnerable victims out of £36m ($51m, €42m) in a ‘boiler room’ fraud operation.
Paul Seakens and Luke Ryan were jailed for 13 years and six years, respectively, for running a business for fraudulent purposes.
They were found guilty by a jury, following a 16-week long trial at specialist court Prospero House Southwark.
Details
According to the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), they were directors of Winchester-based Enviro Associates that sold Voluntary Emission Reduction (Vers) carbon credits to mostly vulnerable individuals using call operatives, making false claims about returns.
The Vers sold to clients were “essentially worthless”, purchased via Seakens’ London-based company CNI for very small sums and then sold by the “boiler rooms” to victims at vastly inflated prices, between 200% – 1,000% mark-up.
The money from the victims was “paid directly to the bank accounts of three London-based clearing companies, CNI, Tocan and Opus, all controlled by Seakens, that deducted a commission and then paid the monies back to the boiler rooms”.
The CPS said the “clearing mechanism was simply a money laundering device”.
The companies were created, in part, to give the Ver transactions “an air of legitimacy so that customers would think that their payments were being made to a safe Financial Conduct Authority regulated third party, and in part because the Ver brokers would not have been able to operate without such a mechanism”.
‘Hideous scam operation’
Jane Mitchell, specialist prosecutor for the CPS specialist fraud division, said: “This was a particularly hideous scam operation, where vulnerable victims lost their life savings on so-called investments that had greatly inflated return claims and no resale market.
“In each of these frauds, elderly and generally inexperienced investors were targeted. They were cold-called in their homes and pressured into buying these so-called investments by criminals who made them look genuine and trustworthy.
“They were conned: the products being sold were, in essence, worthless.
“I would like thank the work of the City of London Police and Hampshire Police on their excellent investigation which enabled us to prove that Seakens and Ryan were exploiting vulnerable victims out of much needed savings for their own selfish purposes.”
