Three men were sentenced at Southwark Crown Court this month over a £70 million pension fraud run from a call centre right here in Bournemouth. Matthew Pickard, Stephen Greenaway and Paul Laver, all local to the area, were jailed for between four and a half and six years for their part in Ethical Forestry Limited – a scheme that persuaded more than 3,000 people, many of them pensioners, to move their retirement savings into a Costa Rica tree-planting investment that had no real prospect of ever paying out.
It’s an extreme case, but the mechanics behind it are depressingly familiar, and worth understanding – not because it could happen to you specifically, but because the tactics used are still in circulation today, just with the details changed.
How it worked
According to the Serious Fraud Office, whose investigation led to the convictions, victims were cold-called and offered a “free pension review”. Once a caller had built up some trust, they were passed to a colleague who recommended transferring their pension into the tree-planting scheme, with couriers sent out to collect signed paperwork within hours – deliberately compressing the time available to stop, think, or ask anyone else’s opinion.
In reality, no credible plan existed to maintain or eventually harvest the roughly two million trees the scheme claimed to have planted, and the company had already collapsed by 2015 owing unpaid tax. Investors’ money, meanwhile, funded a very different kind of return: SFO director Graham McNulty described how the men “preyed on people’s good intentions to support a ‘green’ investment”, while sentencing judge Milne KC called it “plunder pure and simple”. Between them, the three defendants spent an estimated £14 million of investors’ funds on themselves, including a multi-million-pound Sandbanks property, a yacht, a Maserati, and a combined 45 luxury cars. One victim, quoted by IBTimes UK, lost £125,000 and said simply: “How can you treat human beings like that?”
Why victims had so little protection
Part of what made this scheme so damaging is that a tree-planting investment of this kind sits well outside FCA regulation. It isn’t a recognised fund, isn’t covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, and offers no route to the Financial Ombudsman if things go wrong. Once a pension has been transferred into something unregulated, the usual safety nets that protect UK savers simply don’t apply – which is precisely why fraudsters are drawn to structuring schemes this way, and why the “unregulated” status of an investment should be treated as a serious warning in itself, not a minor technicality.
The warning signs, in hindsight and in general
Much of this scheme’s activity predates January 2019, when cold-calling about pensions was banned outright under the Financial Guidance and Claims Act 2018 – so an unsolicited call offering a pension review is now against the law on the caller’s part, not just a bad sign. That ban hasn’t stopped every operator, since anyone already running a fraud has little reason to worry about breaking another rule, but it does mean a genuine adviser or provider will never cold-call you about your pension.
Beyond that one specific rule, the same general pattern shows up in most pension and investment scams the FCA warns about through its ScamSmart campaign: contact you didn’t expect or ask for, pressure to decide quickly or use a courier rather than the post, returns that sound comfortably better than anything else on offer, and a story – often built around something appealing, like a “green” or ethical cause – designed to make you feel good about saying yes rather than encouraging you to ask hard questions.
What to check before you transfer a pension
Before moving any pension, it’s worth checking that the firm involved is genuinely FCA-authorised via the Financial Services Register, rather than simply claiming to be. It’s also worth being wary of “one-off” or time-limited offers, since a legitimate long-term investment rarely depends on you deciding within the hour. Most importantly, get an independent opinion from a regulated financial adviser with no connection to the firm proposing the transfer – not the same firm marking its own homework, but someone with nothing to gain from your decision either way.
A local reminder, not just a headline
Cases like this tend to feel like they belong to somewhere else, but this one was run from a call centre a few miles from our own office. We work with clients across Poole, Bournemouth and the wider Dorset area, and we’d genuinely rather you asked us – or any regulated adviser – an “obvious” question about a pension transfer than find out afterwards that a decision couldn’t be undone. If you’ve ever been contacted out of the blue about your pension, or you’d simply like a second opinion before committing to anything, we’re always happy to have a no-obligation conversation.
Get in touch if you’d like to talk through a pension decision, or check something out, before you commit to anything.
This article is for general information only and does not constitute advice. The information is aimed at retail clients only. All information is correct at the time of writing (September 2026) and is subject to change in the future.
The value of your investments (and any income from them) can go down as well as up and you may not get back the full amount you invested. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance.
Investments should be considered over the longer term and should fit in with your overall attitude to risk and financial circumstances.
The Financial Conduct Authority does not regulate some forms of estate planning, tax planning, or unregulated investment schemes referenced for illustrative purposes in this article.