The Bullet Proof Plan: How Financial Advisors Legally Protect Themselves While Committing Fraud | Ep. 47

Join Amber Waheed in this episode as she shares a shocking financial fraud case involving a so-called "bulletproof plan" devised by a deceptive financial advisor. She shares her personal experience of navigating intricate contract clauses, uncovering a web of deception, and battling the collusion of a trust chairman.

Through this episode Amber reveals how fraudsters craft seemingly legitimate investment schemes that are, in reality, elaborate traps. She explores the fine line between financial fraud and legal loopholes, shedding light on the critical red flags investors must recognize before it's too late. This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to safeguard their financial future against manipulation and deceit.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• How financial fraud is often disguised as legitimate investment opportunities.
• The role of legal documents and contract clauses in protecting fraudsters.
• Amber’s real-life experience with fraudulent financial advisors in the UAE.
• How Guardian Trust Company Ltd. and its chairman played a role in this scheme.
• The warning signs of financial fraud and how to spot deceptive paperwork.
• How fraudsters extract investor fees while allowing investments to dwindle.
• Practical steps for protecting yourself from financial fraud and legal loopholes.
• The importance of scrutinizing financial contracts before signing.

Key Quotes:

• “Fraud isn’t just about deception—it’s about crafting an illusion of trust.”
• “When legal jargon shields fraudsters, victims are left powerless—until they fight back.”
• “If something feels too complicated to question, it’s probably designed that way for a reason.”

Resources Mentioned:

• Amber Waheed’s book: The Great Fraud Fightback (Available on Amazon)
• Wizbizla’s Scam Prevention Programme 

Join the Conversation:

• Share your thoughts using #FraudWeek #TrueCrimeSeries #FraudPrevention
• Follow Wizbizla on social media for more insights on financial safety.
• Have a fraud story to share? Submit your experience at Wizbizla.com

Thank you for listening!

Questions/Feedback or to receive a copy of our 'stories across the emirate' newsletter, please email us on hello@wizbizla.com

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Transcript

The ‘Bullet Proof Plan’: How Financial Advisors Legally Protect Themselves While Committing Fraud 

It’s Fraud Week on the Expats in Dubai show!

Every month, we bring you incredible—and sometimes unsettling—true crime stories that reveal the shocking tales of fraud and deception experienced by expats in the UAE. 

Today, we begin the series with my own personal story - financial advisor scam that changed everything.  Listen in as I walk you through the details of how it happened, what I learned, and how this experience shaped my mission to help others protect themselves.

Welcome to the True Crime Series

Brought to you by Expats in Dubai and powered by the team at Wizbizla.
I’m Amber Waheed.

Introduction: Cloaking Financial Fraud

Financial fraud - comes in all shapes and sizes. Some of it, let’s face it, isn’t exactly very sophisticated. I don’t know when somebody last fell for a message from a dodgy email address with the sender claiming they were a long-lost relative that just needed access to your bank account, - but presumably it worked at some stage somewhere! Otherwise people wouldn’t continue to do it. 

That isn’t the kind of ‘bullet proof plan’ I want to talk about today though. Instead we’re going to look at the other kind of fraud, on the other extreme of things. This is financial fraud that can be very complex and almost impossible to identify. It involves con-artists using real companies and real financial instruments that to even a cautious investor can seem completely legitimate. In fact, as I’m all too aware, this level of complexity can even involve multiple people operating different companies overseas. This is where it gets really tricky, - because once your money is being managed through different companies and investment strands, you reach a point where it’s hard to understand what’s actually happening without having a professional knowledge of financial and contract law in overseas jurisdictions. In fact, it can be so insidious that you are in some ways involved in the fraud, because everything seems above-board and the salient legal terms that allow the fraud to occur in the first place are buried in the midst of complicated financial paperwork that uses your own signature. 

Financial fraud of this kind amounts to what I have called a ‘bullet proof plan’ in my book The Great Fraud Fightback. I refer to it as such because, in this kind of fraud, the con-artists at the centre of it, go to great lengths to make themselves legally ‘bullet proof’ before they start systematically robbing you. Today I want to talk through how this ‘bullet proof plan’ worked in my experience. Hopefully it might serve as a warning to others!

A Recap of My Story: Neil Grant and Guardian Trust Company Ltd.

So before we explore the ‘bullet proof plan’ and how it worked, let’s just recap on my own story and how I came to be involved in a major financial fraud case in the United Arab Emirates several years ago. Regular listeners will be aware of my story, but for those that aren’t, a bit of context will be useful here. Back in 2010, I began receiving financial advice from a fellow expat in Dubai by the name of Neil Grant. Many people that I knew and trusted had invested money with Grant and he seemed to be an entirely legitimate financial advisor. After numerous meetings I invested tens of thousands of pounds with Grant. At all times everything seemed above board. The paperwork was professional and involved established companies. Furthermore, The investments were in what seemed like safe entities, including insurance policies in the Channel Islands and in Anglo-Irish Bank, the latter of - which was one of Ireland’s largest banks at the time. Both I and many other people that I knew, that had invested with Grant. were clear with him that we wanted our money invested in conservative, safe ways. This was just a few years after the financial crash of 2008 and most people were very wary of risky investments. 

Most of the investments I made with Grant were through a financial entity called Guardian Trust Company Ltd., hardly a name which sounds suspicious in any way, though I would soon realise how ironically unfunny the appearance of the word ‘Trust’ in the name of the company was. And over the course of several years my investments with Grant through Guardian Trust seemed to lose more and more money. This was not ‘normal’ market fluctuations. All investments are susceptible to ups and downs depending on global financial conditions, but this was different, especially so since the global economy was finally starting to show signs of recovery in the mid-2010s after the Global Recession. Yet my investments with Grant, didn’t reflect this - and over time I became more and more suspicious that something was deeply wrong. Thousands of pounds were seemingly being lost and, as I would discover when I began trying to get to the bottom of what was happening, the situation was actually more drastic than I even realised. 

A long fight to uncover the truth of what was happening and then chasing Grant through the courts in the UAE once I realised that he was running a very sinister form of financial fraud followed. One aspect of how Grant was able to do all of this to me and others - was what I term the ‘bullet proof plan’. To understand how this worked we have to consider the role of an associate of Grant’s called Philip Van Neste. 

The Accomplice: Philip Van Neste

So who was Philip Van Neste? Over the years that my case went from me having suspicions about Grant’s activity, to then investigating what Grant was doing with my money, to finally pursuing Grant through the courts, Van Neste’s name kept coming up. Eventually I realised I would have to look further into what his role in the fraud had been. What I discovered was that Van Neste was clearly not some innocent bystander, a stooge who just happened to work for some company Grant had dragged into his crimes. No, not at all. Rather it was the case that he and Grant were working closely together. Van Neste was a Jersey-based financial services provider and the chairman of Guardian Trust Company Ltd., so effectively what Grant was doing in the UAE was convincing individuals like me to invest their money in a company run by Van Neste in the Channel Islands. 

The Channel Islands, for anyone not too familiar with Britain’s overseas territories, are a set of islands in the English Channel, very near the coast of France, but for historic reasons they are British territories despite their proximity to France. Different tax laws and financial rules operate here, as they are not part of the United Kingdom, and the Islands are a hotbed of tax evasion and dubious financial activity, much like other British overseas territories like the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands. If you want to get a sense of exactly how questionable the financial activity that’s underway in the Channel Islands is, consider that the domiciled population of the island of Jersey, the financial hub of the Islands, is just over 100,000 people, yet according to a 2020 report there are over one trillion pounds sitting in trusts, funds, companies and foundations based on the island. This money didn’t arrive to the Channel Islands by accident. It’s there because the island’s main industry is tax evasion and financial misconduct. I was about to learn exactly how dubious the financial activity being carried out on Jersey could be (and perhaps even more shocking, just how woefully inadequate its regulators and the Ombudsman truly are).                                                          

The Bullet Proof Plan

Now here’s how the ‘bullet proof plan’ that Grant and Van Neste operated actually worked. Once Grant had sold his clients on the idea of investing their money through Guardian Trust Company Ltd. in the Channel Islands, he had a pile of very professional looking paperwork to be signed. In the middle of this documentation was a document known as a ‘Prescribed Direction’. What this did, once signed, is effectively give Grant the power to make decisions concerning my money that was being invested with Guardian. Now that may seem like a fairly reasonable power to give to a financial advisor, but the documentation was produced in such a way so as to not directly mention Grant on the Prescribed Direction. As a result, if things went wrong or something untoward started happening, I would have no legal recourse against Grant. It was inevitable that they would go wrong. From Grant and Van Neste’s perspective this was the entire point of the arrangement. 

What’s more, in the weeks that followed, as part of what seemed like relatively standard paperwork concerning a client’s new investment with Guardian, clauses were included, -buried amongst other legal minutiae which effectively absolved Guardian of any responsibility for what happened to my investment as well. Now, through some complex legal clauses in financial documents that would be fairly impenetrable to the average investor, both Grant as the financial advisor and Van Neste as the chairman of Guardian Trust Company Ltd. had effectively thrown a barrier around themselves. This barrier prevented clients like me from having any legal recourse to pursue them if and when the money that had been invested through Guardian started to evaporate. This made them, in a very real sense, ‘bullet proof’ from a legal perspective. 

In fact, as an extra layer of protection, Grant and Van Neste even produced an additional document called a ‘Terms of Business’ document that made them even more legally protected. As you can imagine from the pattern I’ve described up to this point, this had the appearance of being a legitimate business document, but in fact what it boiled down to was Van Neste producing a statement about how he had vetted Grant as part of the alleged due diligence involved in setting up the trust. This was like one bank robber writing a reference for his accomplice, another bank robber, to get a loan from a bank. But from a legal perspective, it added to Grant’s legal protection should I seek to pursue him legally. It made their operation even more ‘bullet proof’. 

It’s hard to appreciate unless you’ve had direct experience of it, exactly how devious this entire scheme is. As I describe in my book, it’s basically like wandering into an ornate and bizarre world where Grant and Van Neste had set up a pyramid scheme hiding in plain view. It was all done right under the nose of me and their other unsuspecting victims, - a perfect crime, undertaken with the unintentional consent of the victim. My own lawyer would later describe it as, quote, ‘clever’ and ‘genius’, though - I was understandably less inclined to characterise it in those words. And now that they couldn’t be hit, this is when they started enriching themselves. And They did it through the mechanism of investor fees. 

Investor Fees: Pilfering a Client’s Account

Not only did the paperwork that was drawn up concerning my investment in Guardian disguise the fact that both Grant and Van Neste were being legally protected, there was also a section of the terms and conditions which stated that Guardian would pay Grant directly for providing financial advice on the investment. This was included in the paperwork in very opaque language of a kind that few people, - unless they are familiar with contracts of this kind, would ever really question. What this meant is that after the initial documentation went through, Van Neste was effectively able to pay Grant with my money without ever consulting with me. They also had broad powers to determine how much Grant should be paid. And as I’ve already described, they were also now seemingly legally protected if I found out that my money was being channelled in large amounts from Guardian to Grant. 

As I outline in detail in my book, the fees paid to financial advisors and brokers in general are exorbitantly high, often taking around 50% of your profits. What created additional damage in my case, and the case of Grant’s other clients/victims, is that he intentionally massaged the figures of how investments were performing to make it seem as though they were doing ok, whereas in reality our money was being systematically pilfered. All the while, Van Neste continued to authorize investor fee payments to Grant through Guardian on the basis that the investments were actually performing well and so the investor fees should be higher than was typically allowed. This is a mechanism which is in-built into many investor fee contracts to reward the person running the trust or offering financial advice if the fund performs well, a somewhat understandable mechanism designed to incentivise good performance on the part of the advisor. In this case though, - Grant and Van Neste simply manipulated the figures to pay out higher fees as though the trust was performing well, when it was anything but. How they did this was again fairly complex. When presenting details of how the trusts were performing they calculated the value based on something called the Net Asset Value, but this was computed based on the value of the trust when redemptions on it were suspended. In layperson’s terms what this meant is that when they presented the financials to people like me it appeared as though the investments were performing better than they were and as a result higher investor fees should be paid to Grant. 

The most egregious example of this manipulation of investor fees, in my personal case, came towards the end of the process. I instructed Van Neste to close the Trust in 2018 and requested a full breakdown of all the financials. He managed to delay and prevaricate on doing this for two years and all that time investor fees were still being paid out. It was only when the trust ran out of money that he closed the account.

“Everybody’s Doing It”

It should be clear from all of this that the system which Grant and Van Neste were operating was very sophisticated. It involved a complex series of financial arrangements and contracts which allowed them to disguise what they were doing with my money and the money of many other unsuspecting targets. Through these they were effectively able to use our money as their own slush fund that they would systematically drain over time. Perhaps the most striking thing about all of this is what a financial advisor that I consulted in the midst of my case against Grant said. He was candid about the use of non-standard entities and the way they were being exploited to enrich financial advisors at the expense of their clients, stating, and I quote, “Everybody’s doing it, everybody knows it’s wrong, and everybody knows it’s going on – and so no one should rely on these advisors anyway.” That’s a staggering admission of how rampant fraud can be in the financial advice sector. It is particularly rampant in some economies where unscrupulous individuals like Neil Grant know that there is a lot of money floating around and a regulatory environment that is conducive towards fraud. Specifically, in this case, Grant was operating with a licence in the UAE which allowed him to appear as though he was qualified to offer financial advice when in reality he wasn’t. 

Fortunately, I was able to get my money back, but it took several years of my time, an enormous amount of stress and immense determination to do so, not to mention winning a landmark case in the courts of the UAE. Hopefully by describing all of the pitfalls of the ‘Bullet Proof Plan’ I’ve ensured anybody listening can avoid being defrauded in the same way. 

Call to Action 

The ‘bullet proof plan’ was just one aspect of my long fight against the financial fraud that I experienced. There was considerably more to it, so for anyone listening who wants to learn about the entire story and how I fought back against both Neil Grant and Philip Van Neste why not pick up a copy of my book, The Great Fraud Fightback: The true story of one woman’s struggle against an international crimewave. It’s available through Amazon and all good bookstores. If you’re in the United Arab Emirates or considering moving as an expat to the UAE, you might also consider looking into the business I set up based in part on my experiences of fraud and my years of familiarity with being an expat in Dubai. This is called Wizbizla. Through it I am building up a network of businesses and service-providers in the UAE that are accredited, properly licensed and reputable in their business practices so that customers can work with people who won’t attempt to defraud them in the way I was. 

Thank you for joining us for this episode of the True Crime Series.

Don’t forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Next month – on True Crime on the Expats in Dubai Show, we turn to the story of Influencer, Debbie Steedman and the Facebook Group deal gone desperately wrong.

Catch the episodes on True Crime

Presented by Expats in Dubai and powered by the team at Wizbizla.

I’m Amber Waheed. See you next time.

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