Chris Belcher, mortgage adviser at Gillingham-based A2B Mtg Co Ltd contacted Mortgage Introducer to complain he had not received any enquiries since placing an advert in the summer of 2004.
Belcher paid a fee of £1,000 plus VAT for a 12-month agreement. He said: “We feel like we’ve been led up the garden path. We expected to be on the main Sun website not on a separate one with links to the main site.”
Upon further investigation 20 brokers are listed for the county of Kent; out of 10 firms contacted not one had written any business as a result of the advert.
Audrey McVeigh from Medway Mortgage Shop signed up in July 2004 paying around £1,200. She said: “We haven’t even received one enquiry, never mind done any business through the advert.”
Hailey Martin, adviser at Besure for Mortgages, said: “We’ve not had a sausage, it was a waste of time and money.”
Graham Gardner, managing director at Lifetime Financial Services Ltd, said: “It was sold as having over a million impressions per month yet I have not had a single enquiry. The hook was The Sun name.”
John Spencer, general manager at Wicked Media, confirmed that the website received in the region of 108 million page impressions per month.
He explained it made no guarantees regarding enquiries or business volumes that would be received and stressed advertising was speculative.
He denied any promises had been made to brokers about gaining a monopoly over any one area.
He said: “It is our intention to provide a good service and to build long-term associations. Such services have been promoted to a significant degree and we will be looking to promote them even further in the future.”
