Alex Wood was once a prolific fraudster who conned people out of millions before several jail stints. He’s now reformed and teaching people how to watch out for scams
Reformed fraudster Alex Wood has some advice for anyone with a bank account(Image: (image courtesy of Alex Wood))
As a musical prodigy, violinist Alex Wood toured the world, playing his violin at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle as well as major international concert halls. But it was a very different sort of fiddle that came to characterise Alex’s adult life.
Alex’s music career came to an abrupt halt when he was 24. “I developed a bit of strain injury in my early twenties in my right wrist, “ he told the Mirror, “and it led to a very sudden sort of stop in my career.”
From his mid-twenties onwards he became a prolific fraudster, sometimes netting as much as a million pounds with one 40-minute phone scam. “I certainly had a capacity for committing fraud, and I was very good at it,” he said. “I committed every sort of fraud you could possibly imagine for about 25 years.”
Now, after a lengthy criminal career that saw him jailed three times, Alex is a poacher-turned gamekeeper, advising the public on how to avoid being fleeced by con-men. He is part of the BBC’s Scam Secrets team and has written a new book Facing the Music: From Her Majesty’s Palaces to Her Majesty’s Prisons which lifts the lid on the lucrative world of fraud.
He has a few simple pieces of advice for anyone who receives a call from someone claiming to be from a bank or other financial institution.
How the scam worked
Alex’s biggest and – as it turned out – last criminal enterprise saw him sentenced to seven years behind bars. While Alex has now put his criminal past behind him, much the same sort of scam is still being carried out on a smaller scale virtually every day – with countless calls being made to ordinary consumers.
Explaining how the operation worked, Alex told us: “The last case, was a multi-million pound, cyber-authorised push payment fraud, which involved me phoning up companies pretending to be the bank and getting them to transfer tens of thousands of pounds.”
Together with an accomplice that he had met in prison, Alex successfully defrauded 12 companies across the UK. Losses against three companies totalled nearly £1.8 million, with one company alone losing nearly £1.3 million.
For Alex, it was as simple as making a phone call. He explained: “We were targeting medium-sized businesses, and I knew that in the UK, a medium-sized business either banks with Barclays or Nat West – they have about 85% of the market.
“So I phone up as Barclays and if somebody said ‘No idea what you’re talking about, mate, we don’t bank with Barclays.’ I’d just remember that number phone back the week later and say I’m from Nat West.”
Alex had a convincing line of patter that led victims to make what they believed were “test” transactions while in fact they were sending huge amounts of money to accounts run by his accomplice.
How to avoid being the next victim
Alex points out that fraud accounts for something like 45% of all reported crime and yet only gets between one and two percent of the police budget. Many cases are for one reason or another never reported at all, he adds.
As a result, Alex says: “You can’t never trust anyone ever. Apply zero-trust principles to any unexpected request for a payment – even if it’s your kids phoning you up and saying, ‘Hi Dad, I need your help.’
“If it’s at work and you’re expecting to pay an invoice at the end of the month and they’re rushing you to pay it early or whatever, anything like that has has a smell about it.”
Always be on your guard if you receive an unexpected request payment, of if you feel as if the person is trying to hurry you. Alex continued: “Fraudsters would always try to rush their victims into making a mistake.
Alex’s number one piece of advice is when someone is trying to make you hand money over quickly, “that’s when it’s important to step back, take five, and and, just check”.
If the bank phones you up, they won’t mind if you hang up and phone back on a different number. They want you to be safe. So you don’t need to worry about hanging up and upsetting people.
He continued: “If you think something’s up, then then you can flag it with Report Fraud, which recently replaced Action Fraud as the National Reporting Service.”
A life of crime
Alex had already flirted with with crime before his injury, while he was still at the prestigious Purcell School for Young Musicians: “I was 16 and I got a summer job in Burton’s menswear. And I used to steal the gift vouchers because there were these old books of gift vouchers back in the days before vouchers were digitally recorded on the till system.”
These gift vouchers, he explains, would be printed in books that could be worth about £5,000 in total. The teenage Alex would simply spend a fraction of each voucher’s value in shops such as Top Shop or Top Man and and take the change in cash.
But after losing his future in music, Alex’s offences “sort of graduated in seriousness” he says. When he was arrested for his part in a fraudulent share scheme, he was arrested and jailed. But first stint in prison became, essentially an apprenticeship in crime, he says.
For the first week or so, prison is “terrifying,” but prisoners are quickly sorted into groups. He continued: “The officers very quickly vet you and, and, and if you’re in for a, a sort of low level white-collar offence, you know, where you’re not interested in gang culture, you’re not smoking drugs all day. You not trying to attack prison officers. You’re seen as low risk and you’re literally shipped out to the countryside and so I ended up in Hollesley Bay, which is an open prison.”
There, Alex says he learned from more experienced criminals how to commit ever more elaborate frauds. He went on: “When in prison, met people who were much better at crime than me … I formed a much deeper and darker conspiracy in prison.”
It was after he was released that Alex committed some of his most notorious crimes. Posing as the 13th Duke of Marlborough, and booked himself into top London hotels, instructing staff to send the often huge bills to Blenheim Palace. During one stay at Claridges in Mayfair, he spent almost £1,800 in just three days.
Even after being detained in connection with a fraudulent booking at London’s Great Northern Hotel, Alex couldn’t resist the temptation to live the high-rolling life of an aristocrat and racked further bills of nearly £8,000 at hotels in Mayfair, Canary Wharf and South Kensington while he was on bail.
He was jailed for a second time in 2015. But his biggest crime – the push payment fraud – was yet to come.
Alex Wood is appearing at The Hunter and the Hunted event at Cheltenham Science Festival on Tuesday June 2. www.cheltenhamfestivals.org
