Make a note of its other names: Industry and Commerce, Portal Empresarial and European City Guide (ECG). They are one and the same and are crooks of long-standing.

Kabita Patel got in touch from Village Discount Store in Swansea. She had received one of Industry and Commerce’s notices saying that the business would be registered in a directory. Was it correct? It was not. It had the business down as a post office. (Whether this is sloppy or deliberate is something I have debated with myself for more than a decade.) So she sent it back with an annotation saying, not post office, just a convenience store. No other details except her signature.

Then the opposite of fun starts. She got the bill… a staggering £2,999.26 for an ad somewhere in a probably mythical guide.

She’s just had these b******s back on to her threatening debt collectors.

In December Kabita had gone to her local Trading Standards office for their advice (which backed up mine: it’s a con; ignore). I frequently send retailers to their trading standards officers but they don’t all get the same result, and they should because my files show that, at least since 2003, ECG - despite being closed by several courts - was chasing its own tail around Switzerland and Austria before settling in Valencia where it has been ever since.

Advice: Do not respond; you’re the target. Don’t let them know they have hit it.

Topics