How criminals are setting up fake banks on Companies House
Anyone can set up a company on Companies House, and say it's a bank. We've written an automated tool that smokes them out. In three minutes, it identified sixteen "banks" with fake assets.
The trick here is a simple one: you need permission from the Financial Conduct Authority to have the word "bank" in your company's name, but you don't need permission to categorise the company as a bank on Companies House.
And many fraudsters are taking advantage of this "trick" - creating companies, categorising them as "banks", and filing fake balance sheets that make the companies look hugely valuable.
Today we're publishing our analysis of the sixteen fake banks, together with full instructions on how to use our tool to find companies with fake accounts.
Do any branches of government ever actively engage with you on this type of issue that you so excellently expose or do they choose to ignore treating you as some kind of irritant?
Great, but this detail is simply overwhelmed by the serious breaches of the Companies Act by public figures making multiple entries using different versions of their names.