FCA issues warning Against Yet Another Clone Company DuPont Financial

The cloning of legitimate financial institutions in an attempt to deceive the less experienced would be investors and rip them off, continues to plague the financial services industry and with fraudsters becoming increasingly resourceful in order to make their fakeness less visible and more believable, means that financial watchdogs worldwide need to be extra vigilant and step up their pace in order to cope and offer a safety network for investors.

Against this background, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority issued a warning against DuPont Financial, DuPont FX & DP Global Services Ltd, which are all identified by the regulator as being fraudsters using the details of firms which are indeed authorised in order to convince people that they represent a genuine, regulated firm.

Indeed, while DuPont Financial claims on its website to have been operating since 2011, its website and the firm itself has no link whatsoever to the EEA Authorized company that is trying to mimic, namely Dupont Denant Contrepartie S.A. which is operating as a subsidiary of the French investment bank Natixis Securities SA.

Having little weapons in their hands in order to combat this phenomenon, since attempts to limit traffic towards certain websites have proved very problematic for those trying to impose them, and also faced with the fact that fraudsters also appear to always be one step ahead, discovering new, innovative ways to trick unsuspected, innocent victims, leaves regulatory authorities with little room for maneuver.

Their only hope to reverse this trend is their constant appeals to the public to enforce “self-protection” measures, to report all suspicious firms, especially those that resort to cold calling and to always have in mind that clone companies tend to mix lies with the truth, also using genuine details of companies just in order to prevent the potential victims from discovering the discrepancies from the original firm.