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A £2.7m boiler room fraudster who used different names for his crimes and was jailed for nine years for his crooked activities, has been banned by the FCA.
Clint Canning 45, of Essex, was sentenced and handed a 15 year director disqualification at Southwark Crown Court on 3 February.
He had been found guilty of conspiracy to commit fraud at the same court in December 2022.
Last week the FCA prohibited Mr Canning, also known as Christian Beauchamp and Clint Foster, from performing any function in relation to any regulated activity. Mr Canning was a director of a firm which was registered with the FCA as an appointed representative firm between March 2015 and June 2015.
Between 2014 and 2015 under the name Clint Foster, he was part of the setting up of a company called Base2Trade, which claimed to invest in the binary options market – a type of fixed-odds betting. The company was shut down in 2015.
A total of 175 known victims invested £2,718,590 in the company, according to the City of London Police. Victims, the majority of whom were 50 or older, were cold-called to discuss the potential to make money by investing in Mr Canning’s company and offered earning potential of between £1,126 to £2,250 profit per week, with an 88.3 per cent success rate.
Victims were given a username and password for an online trading platform which showed faked investments and fictitious trading results. They were called repeatedly by Base2Trade with requests for further investment and told their investment had to be turned over a number of times before it could be returned. One victim invested more than £99,000 to increase their income post-retirement and received no return on their investment.
When the scam came to light, police put out an alert for Mr Canning and he was eventually arrested at London City Airport in February 2016. In March 2017 the High Court of Justice disqualified Mr Canning from acting as a company director for eight years.
In 2019, having changed his name to Christian Beauchamp the previous year, Mr Canning set up and became a company director of another firm, in contravention of the 2017 disqualification order. The firm was registered with the FCA as an appointed representative firm between May 2020 and February 2021 with Mr Canning the sole director.
In May 2021, under the name Christian Beauchamp, Mr Canning was sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment and disqualified from acting as a company director for seven years. At the sentencing hearing, the judge said that the breach “was committed over a substantial period of time while [Mr Canning was] pretending to be Christian Beauchamp and the breach was motivated by personal gain” and that Mr Canning was “a dishonest man through and through.”
He was back in court in December where he was convicted of “conspiring to dishonestly make a false representation and intending to make a gain for himself or another, or to cause loss to another or to expose another to a risk of loss contrary to s2 of the Fraud Act 2006”. At the sentencing hearing, the judge said that the breach was a “typical example of what is commonly known as boiler room fraud.” He described Mr Canning as “a relentless fraudster who lies readily and fluently.”
Banning Mr Canning, the FCA said: “On the basis of the facts and matters, it appears to the Authority that Mr Canning is not a fit and proper person to perform any functions in relation to any regulated activity carried on by any authorised person, exempt person or exempt professional firm. His convictions demonstrate a clear and serious lack of honesty and integrity such that he is not fit and proper to perform regulated activities.”
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