What is boiler room fraud?
A Boiler Room is a bogus stockbroker, usually based overseas, which cold-calls investors and pressures them into buying worthless shares. Historically victims were usually middle aged men with previous experience of investments/share/stock dealings, who typically lost £20,000 each to the fraudsters. However, recently we have seen a sharp rise in the number of women and younger men being targeted by the Boiler Rooms. In the current economic climate, Boiler Rooms are starting to target victims who have redundancy money or those who are not experienced investors. The biggest individual loss to date recorded by Operation Archway is £1.2M. Indeed, the Boiler Rooms have developed new strategies to target victims such as a promise to recover monies lost to the original Boiler Room, in the format of a Recovery Room. In addition victims are being encouraged to sell previously highly regarded ‘blue chip company shares’, such as banks and financial institutions and to invest in green and new tech
