Recently I advertised in a couple of magazines to explore how well external advertising may help towards the Christmas period. Nick and I designed a great image that was a good size for any magazine and had it accepted by the editors etc. We paid our money and the advertiements duly appeared – all very good…

However a couple of weeks afterwards, a company calling themselves “The Switch Group” sent a letter containing a very badly designed advert using items and images copied from my home page. They were also asking for £299 and expected payment within 14 days. Since we had never heard of this ‘company’ Nick checked them out and saw they were not the best people to deal with (to say the least). We ignored the letter. A week later we started getting phone calls from the same company. Messages were left on the answerphone, buy we never answered or replied, since we did not want to deal with a company who were demanding money for something we had never signed for or verbally agreed to. These calls continued up to the Christmas period and then stopped.

Now in the New Year, we have had one more call from “The Switch Group” and another letter asking for the same money (oh, how nice – we can have a 10% discount if we pay promptly…). We’re not doing it! We have now reported this to Action Fraud www.actionfraud.org.uk/report_fraud and now have a crime report number. If you are having the same problems then I suggest you report these scam / fraudsters as soon as possible. Call the Action Fraud on 0300 123 2040 and help to get this sort of thing stopped. We haven’t lost money – but others have.

Happy New Year!
Jane xx