By Kirstin Ridley
LONDON (Reuters) – The UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) launched a public appeal on Thursday for information about a suspected six-year scam involving services for timeshares or holiday clubs.
Five suspects have been arrested and four properties raided after a suspected organised crime network cold-called people offering an exit or compensation from unspecified timeshares or holiday clubs for an upfront fee, the SFO said in a statement.
Those who bought these services between January 2018 and September 2024 are then believed to have been contacted again and pressured into paying another fee to recover that money, on the basis that they had been scammed, the SFO added.
The public appeal came as SFO Director Nick Ephgrave called again this week for whistleblowers to be incentivised to help get better evidence quicker and narrow often complex, multi-national investigations involving mountains of data and documents.
Ephgrave said he was baffled why criminals can be paid to give evidence but it is considered “not British” to pay potentially law abiding citizens to solve serious financial crime.
The former senior police officer told a news conference at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank on Tuesday that a new report presented a strong case for reform.
“Many hundreds of whistleblowers have chosen to go abroad to blow the whistle because there is simply no incentive for them to do that here … That means we don’t get the benefit of bringing those individuals, those corporations to justice in this country,” he said
The SFO said that reward programmes in the United States, where one whistleblower was awarded almost $279 million last year, had been “very successful”.
But some lawyers are worried incentivised whistleblowers will be implicated in crimes and lack credibility and integrity in a system where judges, not prosecutors, control outcomes.
RUSI researchers and anti-corruption groups have called for a consultation on how a reward scheme would work with existing legal frameworks to protect whistleblowers, British disclosure requirements and other differences to the U.S.
legal system.
(Reporting by Kirstin Ridley; Editing by Alexander Smith)
