The owner of the popular Into the Wild Coffee Shack in Hale says he feels his business is “back to square one” after being scammed out of £32,000 by online criminals.
Adam Taylor owns the outdoor cafe in ancient woodland near the River Bollin, where he also runs courses, workshops and events for his Into the Wild Bushcraft business.
But the future of the business has been put under threat after Taylor fell victim to a sophisticated online scam called ‘number spoofing’, where criminals pretended to be from his online bank Tide.
He said: “When I checked the number which I was meant to call, there was a website, obviously that was a fake website, so I called the number up, and there was somebody on the other side who acted as a Tide banking member, and they were able to send me codes through the messaging service in the app.
“They’re very desperate people, and if they’ve got children I don’t know how they look at themselves to be honest. Just very low, very low people.”
Taylor said he is now having to start the business from scratch.
“We were scammed of all our money,” he told Granada Reports. “We worked all the way through lockdown trying to build the business up and now we’re back to square one. It’s been very difficult to build it to this point but now we’re starting all over again.”
The situation was made worse by the response of Tide, who did not respond to any messages for nine days while Taylor was trying to find out what had happened.
“I never send that kind of amount of money to anybody – that should have been a flag straight away, as soon as that money left my account they should have frozen it straight away and said ‘hang on, are you really meaning to send this money somewhere?’ Call me up, actually speak to me.
“There was nobody at the bank to talk to when it happened. It took nine days for them to call me up and talk to me. Nine days of worrying where my money was.”
After initially being offered just £100 in compensation, Tide has since recovered £13,000 for Taylor.
The bank has also agreed that they should have responded more quickly to the situation.
A spokesperson said: “Fraud prevention and security are the utmost priority at Tide. We make clear to our members that Tide would never call them or ask them to transfer money.
“As soon as we were informed of the fraud, we acted very quickly, and we were able to recover more than £13,000 for Mr Taylor.
“We have looked into the matter thoroughly and believe we did all we could to retrieve as much of the money as we could as quickly as possible.”
