So what happens next.......?!

[Haylabamba]

We posted on here on the 15th February detailing an escrow fraud that we had unfortunately fallen for losing £14,800 in the process.

We have reported the fraud to our local police who processed the crime, gave it a crime number and then transferred the case to the Metropolitan police as the CHAPS transfer was made to a branch of Barclays in London.

We have also contacted our bank (NatWest) and the "escrow company's" bank (Barclays) and been given a reference number from Barclays. In addition, we spoke with Trading Standards.

Since doing all this, nothing seems to have happened despite repeated phone calls...... The Met have only just allocated the case to an officer who is apparently very busy and will call us when he/she can.......!

We were led to believe that the fraudulent account had been frozen and that the police were aware that sums (sufficiently large to show that it wasn't just our money coming out) had been withdrawn from various accounts around London.

Apologies for the rambling intro, I guess our question is .... What happens next?!
Ideally we would like to believe that we could take an action against the account holder of the Barclays account and recoup our money but things seem to be moving so slowly that we have little confidence in the investigation process.
Is it worth finding/appointing a solicitor to commence proceedings against the account (fully appreciate that I don't know the account holder but surely Barclays do?).

Any advice on what to do next? We am very loathe to let this drop especially if there is an account sat with money in it?!

[peg]

Certainly keep after the various agencies to verify their progress. Given the amount of money you have lost (or may lose), I know I would consider seeking a solicitor, but of course that is going to cost you more money and you may still be out of luck.

I know it's not necessarily what you wanted to hear. You at least have a glimmer of hope. Many others lose their money/merchandise outright and have no chance of recovery. I was one of those folks. That is why I started this site. I hope that I can at least make their (the scammers) efforts difficult, and at best get them caught. Full disclosure of their activities is the key (if we can get it), that is why I (and others) encourage providing every bit of detail about the scammers that they have to help identify patterns, and other things that could be used to either catch them or warn and educate others.

[Haylabamba]

Hi Peg
We will keep plugging on!

So many thanks for this site, I know it sounds a bit selfish but we took some comfort from finding out we weren't the only ones (far from it apparently!) that had beem scammed.

We won't let this one rest. Bizarrely, a couple of minutes after my post, I got a call from the Met giving me a contact name who has promised to call me back by Monday with an update as they are "actively following some leads".

We will look into the solicitor angle and will post our experiences if it will help anyone else. We are determined to get some sort of result. Even if we never see our money, we are delighted that one of the fraudsters accounts has been frozen with "considerable funds" in it.

Who knows? We might get a result in the end.