Reporting FS for misselling

Careful with GB and others - yes take 20-50% but similar to this murkey world they take your money when spending 10 minutes of your own time would save you that. In my world claims management companies themselves should be investigated far more than any P2P company.

I agree, getting compensation from platforms is going to be a blood from a stone situation.

My complaint was about tranche five of Whitehaven.

The complaint is that FS "sold" the loan as a well advanced project all going well, site cleared and services in place, timber frame paid for and they had SEEN the site to confirm this. Oh, and the LTV would not exceed 70 percent.

They can't have seen the site, they never checked the timber frame was paid for and were gleefully handing out our money while not making the slightest effort to check that any of the borrowers claims were true. They claimed the site was worth 800K based purely on what the borrower had told them, actual value proved to be £30,000.

They have not responded to my complaint within the 8 weeks and unless something happens in the next few hours they will have reneged on their promise to have a response to me this week.

Complete and utter incompetence, negligence, disrespect for their own terms and conditions and for their lenders.

The complaint will now go to the FOS.

It's obviously up to you, but I'd personally avoid using items like the taxi picture in your complaint. I'd stick with demonstrable items where FS haven't complied with their T&Cs or otherwise misled you, i.e. art work should have been in FS storage.

I feel that interpretation of whether "child's play" means 'simple to invest with us' or 'even a child could make a profit' won't really progress your cause.

Yes. And yet I think there's a fair argument to make that there's such fundamental mismatch between fundingsecure 's self-representation (marketing claims) and the operational realities, that the concept has been mis-sold. The individual loan details will illustrate whether how valid this is, but the overriding question for me is simply: are they conducting business in line with the basic model and manner they claim to, which is the basis on which they have persuaded people to part with their cash.

Example from their spiel on the trustpilot site (my bold): "FundingSecure is one the UK’s leading alternative investment and lending platforms Our tax efficient Innovative ISA programmes and peer-to-peer lending opportunities are carefully selected, appraised in detail, robustly structured and professionally managed by teams of proven sector specialists. Great customer service, dynamic investment projects, asset-based lending that works".

Looks good, but as the liveliness of this sub-forum suggests, there is quite a bit to unpick there...

r1200gs is right on the money concerning Wytemaven - one of the most clear-cut cases of negligence I have seen on the platform, especially for tranche five, which lacked even the most basic supervision and contained more factually inaccurate promises than the side of a particular campaign bus.

Unfortunately, negligence is hard(er) to prove and a jury or business-biased organisation like the FOS could easily be influenced to believe that the whole omnishambles would never have happened, had it not been for such a dastardly and devious borrower taking advantage of well-meaning, innocent, respectable FCA-approved FS.

Wytemaven is one in a long line of misselling examples where FS failed to do the due diligence that would be expected of a company with FCA approval. I am particularly concerned with some comments I have read on this thread - from FS proxy accounts, I am sure - that seem to imply that "peer-to-peer" means that FS gets to regurgitate the vomitous drivel of borrowers directly and unfiltered into the mouths of lenders, without doing so much as a Google search on the validity of their claims. The valuation, they say, is all that matters and FS can parrot borrower statements with impunity.

No, you are wrong. That is not how any of this works.
Firstly, fraud by false representation is not confined to deliberate acts of malice. Even publishing information that you know might be false or misleading - notwithstanding a preponderance of evidence, merely the existence of doubt - is sufficient to warrant prosecution if done with a view to gain, cause loss to another or even risk causing loss to another. Actual loss need not occur for fraud to be proven, ergo we need not wait for loans to default or be declared "irrecoverable" in order to pursue legal avenues. In the end, if a false statement on a loan description entices a lender to enter into a contract with a borrower and FS knew the loan information might be false or misleading upon publication, the loan has been missold. End of story.

Secondly, we have to distinguish between loans that were set up to fail - simply from a structural point of view - and loans that went pear-shaped over the course of several renewals and misguided tranche extensions. Wytemaven was of the latter category; FS never verified the progress resulting in tranche five being utterly devoid of reality, even if the loan didn't start out this way. I am not sufficiently familiar with the loan to say at what point exactly FS should have known that the loan description was false or misleading. In TheBell loan it is much more clear - FS claimed the project had been sold, maintained the project had been sold for eight months and even commissioned a new valuation on the basis that the scheme had sold, all the while knowing that, without actually verifying the sale for over half a year, this information might be false or misleading. Certainly when the borrower asked for another renewal, eight months after the sale had supposedly been ratified, FS should have been sufficiently suspicious of another renewal request to verify the sale. In not doing so, FS knowingly misrepresented the loan with a view to expose lenders to financial risk of loss, nomatter the accuracy of the valuation.

Loans that were intentionally setup to fail would be any loan that had no reasonable chance of repayment from the start. TheBell, ChatterHouse et al. were all made to companies that could ill-afford more than two renewals; cumulatively the interest payments were ruinous but lenders were never told about the added contango risk. In no case was this more self-evident than in the Barnoldwackadoodle loans. FS advanced loans with interest payments of £400+/day to the same individual in Yorkshire who had nowhere near the high six-figure income to pay even a SINGLE six-month installment for all the loans he was given. It was simply impossible for him to repay these loans and the result was inevitable.
When we speak of misselling, we should not forget that FS has a responsibly to reject loans that are impossible to repay, something they did not do in this case.

And don't get me started on the second charge Barmydoodle loan, that was a whole different level of misselling from the minute the first word of the loan description was composed; I would call it a conspiracy if I thought FS had the intellectual capacity to perform such a feat.

As usual, anyone who doesn't believe that every single action of FS is fraudulent/devious/incompetent is an FS shill. I've made many references to mistakes of FS, but it's clear you're referring to me here as you've paraphrased some of my comments. Well you're wrong, but that doesn't stop the accusations being thrown. Childish.