The FA of Fantasy Funds for Footballers

Dominic Thomas
Sept 2025 • 3 min read

The FA of Fantasy Funds for Footballers

I wonder if you know a professional footballer? Or perhaps you are one. Our offices are located opposite the Chelsea training ground in Cobham. As the season starts and the all important transfer window closes, a lot of money has changed hands (we have seen a new British record payment for a player – £125m for Alexander Isak) with over £3bn spent by the Premier League.

Professional footballers tend to be young, and with the odd exception like James Milner, most end their playing careers by age 35. Some go on to become pundits and coaches, occasionally a Manager.

Sadly, where there is money, there is corruption and I am sorry to report that football is no different. There are a significant number of Agents and villains all set to relieve the player of his money and of course there is plenty of pressure on players off the pitch to simply keep up the appearance of success.

Just like anyone else, young players (and old ones) are not sure who to trust when it comes their finances. Many have been ruined by bad advice or downright fraud. There are advisers who ‘specialise’ in providing advice to players, but this guarantees nothing, and if anything is probably a red flag. Many have lost millions of pounds in investment schemes that they didn’t understand and should never have been exposed to. They were young and not sophisticated investors (most people aren’t) and they have been scammed time and time again.

This isn’t new information, it’s been going on for years, but there is a new documentary on the BBC – which you can see on iPlayer as well – called The Story of the V11. Players get all sorts of abuse from the stands and in the media, but there is and has been a great deal of financial abuse. It is utterly disgraceful and inexcusable. Many of the players involved have lost everything (including their lives due to the perceived shame and resulting suicide). It is desperately sad and could have been avoided.

The main problem that most professional players face is a high income (which is taxed at 45%) and a celebrity lifestyle alongside little if any financial knowledge. So when you see vast sums of tax being taken from your payslip, it’s entirely understandable to ask the question: what can I do to reduce it? (as we all do). Footballers have a short career but usually a very normal life expectancy. However, there are firms of financial advisers that will always attempt to carve out a niche market and claim that they know what makes everyone in that niche tick … then they seek endorsement from others who are well known in the niche and who (by virtue of experience) imply that their recommendations can be trusted.

The reality is of course that everyone is different, we may share lots of similarities, but we are all different. The common ground we share is attempting to secure our own future for when we get sick and are unable to work or decide to retire and stop earning.

The only thing these players did wrong was to trust the wrong person, who financially abused them and sold them investments that were and are… a load of rubbish. The advisers concerned sold utterly awful ‘investments’ (honestly, they cannot really be called investments). The advisers earned huge commissions and pretended that the tax-incentivised schemes (film partnerships) were backed by the Government and were risk-free.

It is a desperately sad tale and I hope that they get justice and the ‘advisers’ concerned all go to prison. They have caused misery and hardship and all the ingredients for a painful existence. When people are victim to these sorts of fraud they often feel stupid; they are not; they were ripped off and taken advantage of by criminals and fraudsters under the guise of being a qualified financial adviser.

Your financial plan does not need to involve complex investments, irrespective of your level of wealth. Investing doesn’t need to be complicated; it’s about owning a diversified portfolio of real businesses that produce income from the profits they make. Some businesses fail, but owning them all in the way our clients do, means the risk is minimal – barring a world ending catastrophic event (at which point none of us will be worried about money).

A good financial plan reflects your aspirations; a great one expresses your values and is reviewed regularly and importantly, you should be able to see the valuation of your portfolio and have it verified by various properly regulated entities.

So, you may not be a footballer, but the issues are the same – trusting the person that is advising you about your money, which is your future. If you know a footballer (I spot many in the Cobham area) or someone who needs our help in providing impartial, transparent advice with clear fees and clear communications, by spreading the word about us you may not be simply saving them money, but perhaps saving their life.

It is my opinion that currently, the legal system, tax system and regulatory framework have all failed to help these players and it is a disgrace – another one.

Get in touch to find out more, share this with a friend.

Here is the link to the BBC documentary: Footballs Financial Shame

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The FA of Fantasy Funds for FootballersJemima Thomas2025-09-05T11:27:28+01:00

The significance of your documents

Dominic Thomas
Aug 2025 • 4 min read

The significance of your documents

It ought to be obvious that trust is the ‘bar of entry’ when being a financial adviser, yet on an increasingly regular basis there are rather sad stories within our sector media about financial advisers who have committed fraud.

There may be a myriad of reasons that result in someone stealing your money, but whatever they are it’s obviously wrong. Stealing from you should be pretty difficult, granted I am well aware that I might call some investment companies and advice firms out for their excessive charges, but however much smoke and mirrors are used, it’s not stealing, that’s fairly typical ‘ripping off’ which is unpalatable and is often a reason why having been over-charged, many eventually realise and come to us so that we can sort it out for them, often saving thousands of pounds in the process.

One of the many safeguards we have is to use third party platforms. These act as investment administrators taking the deposits for new investments or the proceeds of existing ones. They also make the payments directly to your bank account. They issue the statements of investments and documents to support your HMRC self-assessment returns. To be blunt, I don’t know why more advisers don’t use them. They even link live valuations to our secure portal, which is a fuller, deeper version of their own (but only showing assets you hold on their platform).

Advice is highly regulated, some might say too much so, but in my world any and every investment or pension will have to produce a valuation statement at least once a year and ought to be producing contract notes showing sales or purchases (when you buy or sell an investment, or make a payment to your pension). These will normally be sent to you electronically these days, directly by the product provider or platform. You may need to login to their platform, but you will at least have an email advising you to do so. When they are not, alarm bells ought to be ringing.

In this digital age of ‘deepfake’, it is relatively easy to reproduce a document and therefore make something appear different from reality. It would appear that ‘adviser’ Lisa Campbell did precisely this, making up statements for investments that the investor thought were placed, when in reality funds had been sent to her. This is one reason why cheques or payments to us are only for our fees, not for your investments (it’s a safeguard).

Campbell, based not a million miles away in Hampshire, stole around £2.3m from her clients. Some of whom were friends and family. This happened over a 10 year period from 2013. She attempted to cover her tracks by also sending false documents and statements to our regulator the FCA. She was due in court in May. The FCA essentially removed her permissions two years ago, but had at the time rather underestimated the size of the fraud. Hopefully you don’t know anyone who was ‘advised’ by her through Campbell & Associates or Campbell & Raffle (perhaps an ironic name).

Only a few days later another, similar case was announced by the FCA. This time Kerry Nelson and Jacqueline Stephens of Nexus IFA were also charged with defrauding four clients of £2m between 2019 and 2023. Once again documents were forged and the money … well used to “fund a lavish lifestyle”.

As your adviser, we are copied in on correspondence to you by providers, not always, but most of the time. We do not receive statements to forward on to you. In the Campbell case, it seems that investors thought they held Bonds with a Bank; the Bonds never existed.

I suppose that for most investments, it would be a bit of a faff for an adviser to produce fake daily valuations; should you really want to see what your portfolio is worth today and tomorrow you can 24/7.

If you do come across people who you believe could benefit from our low-cost evidence-based investment solutions and impartial fee-based advice (some 13 years before it was compulsory) please do pass on our details. You may be saving your friend an awful lot of money and perhaps from financial ruin.

Reference:

FCA report: https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/fca-charges-hampshire-based-independent-financial-adviser-multiple-fraud-offences

https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/fca-charges-two-individuals-multiple-fraud-charges

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The significance of your documentsJemima Thomas2025-08-21T15:40:33+01:00

The Bogus ‘Financial Adviser’

Dominic Thomas
Sept 2023 • 4 min read

The Bogus ‘Financial Adviser’

There are some lessons to be gleaned from a recent sorry tale about Peter Holbrook who posed as a financial adviser. As often is the case, his focus was on fairly vulnerable people who were recently bereaved.

Holbrook was recently sentenced to prison for five years and three months, so in theory he will be held at his Majesty’s pleasure until he turns eighty. This is for conning seven people out of £850,000 which he used to fund his gambling habit.

The scam lasted 10 years and seems to have involved persuading his victims to allow him to handle Probate and reinvest the proceeds of the estate. His fraud involved forging letters from investment companies and writing Wills, for which I understand he had no formal qualifications or training.

Obviously being conned out of your own money can have devastating consequences. Families are left with a lack of resources in a world which we all know is quick to consume them. Not having enough is pressure enough, let alone having it stolen. Holbrook, like many people, formed a gambling habit. All gambling is based on the erroneous belief that the system can be beaten, the constant winning and losing inevitably leads to a deficit on the balance sheet, the pressure can in turn cause addicts to make decisions that they would be unlikely to make had they not gambled in the first place.

I don’t gamble and if I’m being candid, I don’t believe it’s a good idea. That said, I don’t really think there is anything particularly wrong with the occasional bet for a ‘bit of fun’, but in all honesty I can find more interesting things to do with money. However, in a culture in which many football teams (eight of the 20 [40%] current Premier League teams), or sports teams in general, are sponsored by gambling companies; clearly it will take the usual required will power to go against the crowd. Many have a story about ‘a win’ that they had, but few relay tales of loss.

Sadly, investing is often compared to gambling, which is a failure of education. The association is one of loss. Companies can and do go bust, regularly. If all your money is in one or very few shares, then frankly that is very like gambling (though you are holding real shares in the assets of those companies). Anyone holding shares in Enron will corroborate this. However proper investing is buying shares in a globally diversified portfolio of companies around the world. All working to improve products and services and design new ones. This is how commerce works. It isn’t a perfect system, but it has a long pedigree of success.

We all know that there are some difficult realities of life. We all will die, nobody escapes mortality. Money pays bills, it provides choice, but it needs looking after and getting one’s affairs in order is often tedious and other than peace of mind, provides little ‘buzz’; certainly you are unlikely to get a giddy feeling of anything resembling that of having won the lottery! Investing should be dull; it should be boring. If it isn’t, you are probably holding the wrong cards or playing the wrong game. Finding someone to trust in a world that seems deliberately set up to confuse with jargon and costs isn’t easy. There are only around 28,000 financial advisers in the whole of the UK. That’s not many for a population of 66million.

Nobody wants to be the victim of a fraud or scam, please check with those you care about that they have a bona fide adviser.

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The Bogus ‘Financial Adviser’Jemima Thomas2025-01-23T10:54:08+00:00

Take Five…. for fraud

Solomons-financial-advisor-wimbledon-blogger

Take Five

Not to be confused with Jazz musician Dave Brubeck, “Take Five” is a new initiative to counter-act financial fraud, which is increasing at an alarming rate. According to the latest UK financial crime statistics over a million financial fraud crimes were committed in the first 6 months of 2016. As we live in an online, 24/7 culture, that equates to about one every 15 seconds.

You will have certainly had various emails, which look rather obviously like a scam, but increasingly there are emails from businesses and organizations that you probably recognize, often attaching a document, invoice or receipt. In many instances these are viruses, some more harmful than others. Of course if you aren’t expecting an invoice, you might be concerned that you are being sent one erroneously and wishing to correct the matter, but alas, this is part of the scam.

Many email and internet scams, try to imbed a “Trojan Horse” within your computer, which gathers data about what you look at and your keystrokes. This is an attempt to gather access to your contacts (more punters to try) and of course your own personal information so that money can be spent, stolen or extorted.

Pause for thought

The new campaign “Take Five” is essentially an call to pause, to think carefully before you act – take five seconds to pause. This is because much of the fraud that occurs could be prevented with this very simple strategy. Research has shown that 26% of people continue to provide personal bank details even though they suspect that they should not. 43% said that they shared their details because they felt the person seemed genuine, and 39% said it was because they felt pressured.

Catching you off guard

A staggering 38% of people report that they were busy and wanted to get them off the phone quickly. Of course, the fraudster is also very convincing. Surprisingly, about 37% of people thought they were being scammed during the conversation but still continued with the transaction and almost a quarter (23%) realised after the conversation had finished.

Fear and greed

Most things financial work around two basic dynamics, fear and greed. Fraud is no different; invariably the fraud appears to be helping you, perhaps providing protection for your computer or your bank account. The standard “confidence trick” in all its guises also reveals itself. Some frauds even dupe people into believing that they are assisting with catching a fraudster – playing on your goodwill and sense of social responsibility.

For more information on the Take Five campaign and various frauds please check this website. For music by Dave Brubeck, well…

Dominic Thomas
Solomons IFA

You can read more articles about Pensions, Wealth Management, Retirement, Investments, Financial Planning and Estate Planning on my blog which gets updated every week. If you would like to talk to me about your personal wealth planning and how we can make you stay wealthier for longer then please get in touch by calling 08000 736 273 or email info@solomonsifa.co.uk

Take Five…. for fraudDominic2025-01-21T15:43:59+00:00