Blackmore Bonds has delayed paying quarterly interest on its bonds for a second time.
Investors received an email from Blackmore director Patrick McCreesh saying that the payment due in two days’ time would be delayed until 29th November.
Blackmore’s last interest payment at the end of July was also delayed by a few weeks. In that case Blackmore blamed a “clerical error”. This time around Blackmore has blamed “circumstances outside their control”. At least they didn’t try to blame Brexit.*
Blackmore’s business model, including the 20% commissions paid from investor funds to Surge and other introducers, requires it to generate returns of up to 15% per year to meet its obligations to investors. As recently as March Blackmore claimed its business was “entirely on track”.
As inherently high risk unregulated investments with a risk of total loss, Blackmore’s bonds should only have been promoted to sophisticated or high net worth investors who could afford to invest no more than 5-10% of their free assets, and shrug off the loss if Blackmore defaulted.
Unfortunately, judging by the Trustpilot reviews, this hasn’t been the case for some Blackmore investors.
After the very late interest payment last time this comes as a shock and has only given us 3 days to prepare.
Why were we not notified earlier. I was depending on this interest payment being on time.
At time of writing the Blackmore Bonds website is down, possibly due to excess demand. Investors report that the Blackmore app which allowed investors to view their investments is also down.
Blackmore has twice put off filing annual accounts, blaming the resignation of its auditor. At the beginning of October it claimed its accounts were “almost ready” and will be signed off soon.
*Correction 29.10.19: Oh dear, they did blame Brexit. Money Marketing, who obtained a copy of the full email, notes that McCreesh’s opening stated “2019 has been a very challenging year for businesses in all sectors, with the uncertainty around Brexit slowing down markets. The property market is no exception…”
To be expected of the gruesome twosome that have been fleecing innocent people, at least since 2012 when they began cold calling victims for the Capita Oak and Henley pension schemes scam.
Their Blackmore Group website only has the home page and no others accessible. Their blackmore homes website – https://blackmorehomes.com/property-developments/st-augustines-cheadle-heath/ – still lists only 6 developments (there are 11 listed in last years accounts) see my previous comment for more details https://bondreview.co.uk/2019/10/01/blackmore-bond-to-put-off-filing-accounts-says-the-times/#comments ) further, one of their earliest properties, a converted church in Cheadle Heath has never been updated and still shows 75% complete with a completion date of April 2018!! Also, their flagship development in Stevenage is still not showing on the website! Some flagship – like the Titanic methinks.
I would wager – a lot – this company is going down and lots of people are going to be really upset! And where are the FCA? Action Fraud? Anyone? – Nowhere to be found! The useless, impotent lot! A complete waste of tax payers money!
Not Blackmore, but mini-bonds. A trio (same creator) of the most beautiful examples of scam websites that you’ll ever see. I would wager that the limited company referred to by the first website is not who answers the phone!
https://capitalsecurebonds.com/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIpfPR7d3G5QIVBRUYCh0IBQpGEAAYASAAEgICf_D_BwE
http://www.bondstop.co.uk/
https://apolloinvestmentgroup.co.uk/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIzq68-t3G5QIVjtDeCh3a5QUZEAAYASAAEgJDL_D_BwE
If you know that the FSCS is the financial underpin and the FCA is the supervisor then all references to both, in some instances using strangled English, don’t really work. Nothing is FSCS regulated, not FCA guaranteed. As for the offering, it’s hard to work out if they are clever (ie they have used actual corporate debt stocks and their ISIN numbers although they refer to coupons and dividends) or dim in that these are not new issues but trade on an exchange and current cost more than par – so the GRY is going to be a lot less than the coupon. My facilities are not 100% exhaustive – but I cannot find anyone living in London with the same name as a great Aussie fast bowler who might be providing testimonials on the third of the sites.
For afficiados of these scam offering websites, these ones are real beauties in that they have nearly every tell-tale sign on them – improper regulatory information, no company details, no privacy and other quasi-statutory information, spelling mistakes, incorrect grammar, and a whole host of technical defects. And of course some amber flags as well, like serviced office addresses, multiple “worldwide offices”, website address only registered a month or two ago (and yet they already have testimonials – gosh they move quickly), the “as seen on/in”. the testimonial’s eulogising about the quality of the “financial advice” which is definitely something you cannot provide if not regulated, testimonials that have been lifted from elsewhere so they refer to things that are plainly not on this website such as an “online platform”; and a glorius attempt at describing the FSCS which is a working man’s precis “covered for £85,000” is just elegantly crummy, and not actually correct. At the very least, the word “currently” ought to appear.
Anyway, it goes to show exactly what the climate is, and how incompetently set up the FCA are, because you could have one person, armed with Google, trawling the web each day, and issuing legal take down notices.As things stand, anyone with a bit of HTML coding knowledge and time on their hands can churn this stuff out by the bucketload and hope a schmuck sends a cheque.
I agree, those websites could be “churned” out by the “bucketload” and you don’t even need any “HTML” coding knowledge because these look like common or garden WordPress templates.
In fact, these look like a new strategy in Phishing … they may not even need you to send a cheque, you provide your details and they will strip your accounts bare by lunchtime! They look extremely suspicious. They look very wrong to me.
Look behind all the fake press releases the director has terrible press and was behind a whole host of schemes with failed