Main Dean Wright NNinvestigations scam

So I guess I should start by saying that I despise people and companies who prey on others and fraudulently try to fool people into paying money for something they have no intention of supplying. To be honest I do not understand why these people are not investigated by the police or by trading standards or other agencies. The truth is that they just do not seem to care.

Anyway my story starts with someone from a company called National Networked Investigations, contacting me after I applied for some jobs on one of the job sites. The guy was someone who called himself Dean Wright and the email said that he was the General Manager.

d.wright@nninvestigations.net

In his first email he advised me that his company were looking for people like me who may have the skills to carry out private investigator work. I was looking for work and was getting a little desperate and so I said that I would be interested in taking things further. It sounded authentic, and he asked if it was okay for him to carry out a check to see if I had any criminal convictions. He mentioned that if I had any criminal convictions then I could not work with them, I advised that I did not and presumed he went away to check this.

Then he came back to me by email saying that all checks has proved successful and that his company wanted to offer me a position as a private investigator, working alongside them who would be the agent. He said that he would be able to provide 20 leads per week in my area that I would be able to select cases from, this did seem high and I mentioned this, but he said that the area I lived in was a very vibrant area with lots of cases to work on.

Then he advised that I would be required to take some training, and that they would pay for half of this and I would have to pay for the other half. This came to a total of around £287.50.

I did call the number that I had been given and someone purporting to be Dean Wright called me back and assured me that they were completely legitimate and that they were ready to start passing out these 20 leads per week.

At this point I tried to do a company check on National Networked Investigations, on the companies house website and I could not see any limited company linked with them, this did give me suspicions but I thought that it was possible they were part of some other company. But this should have been a major red flag.

Anyway I paid the £287.50 for the course and then carried out the online course, which again did look plausible. They emailed me a contract

What was interesting was that the course was delivered by another company called Security Industry Training SIT (becomeapi.co.uk/product/private-investigator-system/).  National Networked Investigations advised that they would also give me a named contact who would assist with any issues regarding this training course. Her name was Karen Marston and her email address was k.marston@becomeapi.co.uk

When I had questions about the course I did email her and she did respond, but what was a little suspicious was that the email she responded from was not the National Networked Investigations email. Anyway once I completed the course I was emailed a certificate to prove that I had passed the course.

Once the course was over I emailed my completion certificate to Dean Wright and asked when I would be receiving work as promised. He eventually responded and said thet now I had passed the course he would ask his ‘Live’ case team to contact me.

This eventually happened and someone called Paula Baxter p.baxter@nninvestigations.net contacted me and introduced herself. I emailed her back but did not get a response from her for over a week. By this time I had called Dean Wright several times who advised me that his company were implementing a new computer software application to help them manage the business. I asked how long would it take to implement and he said about 10 days.

2 Weeks later I had still not seen any work or potential leads from him, I then asked him for a face to face meeting on Skype or even better in person and he has always ignored these sorts of emails. Approximately 3 weeks after passing the training course and having not received any work I requested my money back for the course, on the basis that National Networked Investigations ave not honoured any of their commitments.

I have tried several times to speak with him by telephone but he seems unwilling to call me back, I feel I have just been scammed and I am not sure whether it is just National Networked Investigations or them and the other company becomeapi.co.uk that are part of the scam but it now seems clear that they don’t and have never had any intention to supply work in the way they promised.

To this day I have still not seen any work and have paid £287.50 which I borrowed, in order to get myself into paid work. I want to warn anyone who thinks about working with these people of what has happened to me, and to say it will almost definitely happen to you also.