New revelations have surfaced regarding Tide’s involvement in what Tax Policy Associates is coining the “Company Registry” scam, raising concerns among the digital banking services’s customers who have recently registered with Companies House.
The setup targets newly registered businesses and involves fraudulent letters demanding a £45 fee. Tide, an “all-in-one business finance platform” which offers business bank accounts from ClearBank and is regulated by the FCA, reportedly signed up Arkansas-based “Company Registry” as an affiliate and paid £50 for each “customer” referred to them. The link in the company-registry email contains an “affiliate code” which Tide then tracks.
How did people confuse Company Registry with Companies House?
Company Registry is likely to have been scouting new company registrations on the Companies House website because according to Tax Policy Associate’s report, if you incorporate a UK company, you are likely to receive a formal looking letter from “Company Registry” (company-registry.org).
The report stated:
It looks like an official document – an invoice for a service that has already been purchased (“Pending”, “Complete activation”, “These are the next steps”). The reference to a “COVID 19 New Business Relief Deduction” again gives the impression this is an official letter.
“If you go to the website to “activate your account”, everything continues to look official – entering your reference number reveals your company’s details, just as it would for a bona fide company registry.
The Company Registry and Tide link-up has been operating since approximately October 2021, by which it has been targeting unsuspecting businesses, particularly freelancers and small enterprises, by offering expedited company registration services for a fee. We understand Stripe was Company Registry’s payment processor from when the scam started around October 2021. It was only in April 2023 when Companies House published a warning about Company Registry which was widely circulated.
Companies House Site v. Company Registry Site
We’re aware of a scam letter from a sender called Company Registry asking for payment to confirm company details and activate a secure vault.
This is a scam – do not send any money to the bank account shown.
If you receive a suspicious letter, contact us immediately on 0303 1234 500. Never pay any money to the sender.
However, until now, Stripe has been processing payments for Company Registry. It has been therefore inferred that Stripe does not update its KYC/AML checks on its clients on a regular basis or as thoroughly as it perhaps should. However, Tax Policy Associates has since reported that payments have been stopped either as a result of their reports or as a result of earlier tweets.
At the time of writing, Stripe said that they are unable to comment on individual users/clients.
Is there something more worrying about this scam?
The fallout from this scam could be significant. Many freelancers and small businesses who signed up through Tide’s affiliate link are now facing the consequences of unknowingly registering with what Tax Policy Associates is reporting as a fraudulent service. The full extent of the amount of money collected from Company Registry or Tide from related new customer accounts remains unclear, but concerns are mounting over potential data breaches and misuse of sensitive company information.
The “service” they are really selling is some kind of unspecified “document vault” in which companies can store their UTR (i.e. tax code), Government Gateway and Companies House authorisation codes.
This is information that would be extremely valuable to a fraudster, as it would enable them to make Companies House filings (e.g. installing themselves as directors and changing the registered office) and receive refunds from HMRC.
We don’t think anyone should be giving these details to any untrusted third party, and certainly not to the unknown individuals behind “company-registry.org.
–Tax Policy Associates
The scam has raised questions about the destination of the funds collected. There’s a lack of transparency regarding where the money paid for the fraudulent registration services is being channelled, adding another layer of complexity to the investigation.
The fact that a company registered in Arkansas could pass for the official Companies House raises serious concerns about regulatory oversight and the ease with which scammers can exploit loopholes in the system. The real Companies House appears to have been unaware of the scam until recently, highlighting potential gaps in its monitoring and enforcement mechanisms.
Who are the people behind Company Registry and the “legal counsel” representing them?
There is the named registered agent, Kitta Sourinphoumy. According to one background website there is one such named person living in Arkansas aged 33 who also goes by the name Kitta Elefante. The Legal counsel named in the response letter to Tax Policy Associates, Octavian Balan, claims to be the CEO and solo self-employed owner of LegalX.
What will Tide do next?
Tide has written back to Tax Policy Associates saying it is handling an investigation into the matter and has since stopped its dealings with Company Registry. What Tide will do and could do are still unclear. The report suggests Tide contact every customer that was referred by Company Registry, to tell them” they’ve been scammed” and to claim back the amount paid to Company Registry through their credit card issuer. The thing is, if they paid with a debit card, they could have no protection or refund coming to them.
What The Freelance Informer finds odd is how a company offering company registration-related services for UK companies recently registered to Companies House would be operating out of Arkansas. Why did Tide and Stripe not find this odd?
Tax Policy Associates is convinced according to their report that “Tide must have conducted KYC on Company Registry LLC (the Arkansas company running the scam) before paying referral fees. Tide therefore knows who owns the company, and how Tide was making payments to them, and can now pass this information to the police.”
