Banned: Ryan Fraser ran Global Wine Exchange
A serial scammer who specialises in cheating wine investors has been banned from acting as a director of a limited company for 12 years.
Ryan Fraser, 33, from St Albans in Hertfordshire, ran Global Wine Exchange. I warned against it in 2020, after it overcharged a reader and broke a promise to resell his wine at a profit. I found it was little more than a telesales operation, with salesmen expected to make 300 calls a day to potential investors.
The reader who complained was offered a refund if he agreed to try to shut me up. And the company told me: ‘If you do publish an article or warning about Global Wine Exchange, we will be challenging it legally and we are prepared to take action against yourself and your newspaper.’
Well, we did publish, but no legal challenge arrived and in 2022 the company was closed down by the High Court. Investigators from the Insolvency Service now say it banked over £3 million, more than a third of which was taken in sales commission and wages, and it has not been possible to match investors to the wine police found in a warehouse.
Fraser has form for this. In 2017 he was jailed for three years for conspiracy to defraud clients of his company Premier Wine Investment. They poured £362,000 into his business, which police say he spent on trips to Dubai and the US, visits to spa resorts in Bath and Paris, on restaurants in Mayfair, on designer clothes and on rent for a luxury flat.
He was also disqualified as a director until 2027, which means he should never have been in control at Global Wine Exchange. I suspect this is not the end of the story.
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