The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) , the United Kingdom's financial regulatory body, today unmasked yet another fraudulent entity, this time bringing to light a Clone of Baumer Mansoor Financial Advisory (BMFA), according to an FCA statement.
Almost all firms and individuals offering, promoting or selling financial services or products in the UK have to be authorised by the FCA.
The address details of the suspicious clone firm are: Lloyds Avenue House, 6 Lloyds Avenue, London EC3N 3AX , UK. It also lists the following Middle East address on its website: Sheikh Zayed Road, Dubai 17456, United Arab Emirates. BMFA can be found under the website www.baumermansoor.com.
Baumer Mansoor is a common type of fraud known as ‘cloned firms’, which usurp the identity of an existing authorized entity in order to give the appearance of trustworthiness or legitimacy, and thereby to convince investors of its legitimacy.
In this case, the cloned firm embezzled the reference number 442905, which belongs to an authorised firm operates under the name Marketing-und Finanzierungs-Beratungs-G.
A visit to the Baumer Mansoor’s website reveals its attempt to mislead investors that it is offering a legal product and claims to be governed by the FCA. Apparently, the fraudsters behind BMFA are not professional enough as they wrongly wrote the abbreviation of the U.K. regulator as EEA, not FCA.
Based on this, the watchdog stated in its official statement that it strongly advises investors to only deal with financial firms that are authorised, and check the Financial Services Register to ensure they are. It also noted that you should be aware that if you give money to an unauthorised firm, you will not be covered by the Financial Ombudsman Service or Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) if things go wrong.
