On 16 October 1906, a captain of the Prussian Guards marched into the town of Köpenick, just outside Berlin, with ten soldiers behind him. He occupied the town hall, had the mayor and the treasurer arrested for corruption, and confiscated the municipal treasury. It totalled 4,002 marks and 37 pfennigs, which is a huge amount in today’s terms, and then signed a receipt.
Next he put the prisoners on a train to Berlin, changed into civilian clothes at the station, and vanished.
He was Wilhelm Voigt, a shoemaker with a long criminal record, who had been out of prison for eight months. He wasn’t a captain at all, or even a soldier. He’d bought the uniform piece by piece from second-hand shops and tested its effect on soldiers in the street beforehand. It worked perfectly, nobody he spoke to asked to see his orders, they just obeyed the uniform.
Germany found the whole thing hilarious. Voigt became a folk hero, the Kaiser was reportedly amused and later pardoned him. The writer Saki even coined a verb for it: “to Köpenick”, meaning to replace real authority with a convincing imitation.
We’ve recently been Köpenick’ed ourselves.
A group on Facebook with thousands of members started promoting high-risk property investments using Altor’s name and logo. To make it more convincing, it posted images of our office with a version of our logo on the front. The office looked amazing, all shiny glass/steel and a logo that would have been about 20ft square in real life. Of course, our office is a little more modest looking than this one and doesn’t have a giant logo stuck on the front. We reported the group to Meta and they removed our name and logo. The AI-generated picture of the building stayed up though, their AI generated compliance bot could real our name and logo but not an image containing our logo.
We don’t tell this story because we or our clients lost anything. We tell it because it’s a very clear story of how fraud works now.
Voigt needed a uniform, and he had to find one, piece by piece. Today’s fraudster needs a logo, a website, some photographs of a respectable office and a few glowing testimonials, and all of it can be produced in an afternoon, at no cost, by someone who has never been within a hundred miles of Hampshire. The uniform has become too easy and low cost to get.
It is clearly not just us, UK Finance’s latest annual fraud report found that investment scams cost victims £221million in 2025, up 40% on the year before, across nearly 15,000 cases. That works out at roughly £15,000 per case, more than twenty times the typical loss to a purchase scam, and the report notes that investment fraud often starts with fraudulent advertising on social media.
And the platforms carrying those adverts are not, in our experience, going to protect you. They’ll take down the obvious things eventually. They won’t take down everything, and they won’t do it fast.
Sadly you have to protect yourselves.
Check the firm on the FCA’s register, and then contact it using the details on the register, not the ones in the advert, the email or the WhatsApp message. Clone firms copy everything about a real business except the real contact details.
Look for the FCA’s warning list and its ScamSmart pages, which exist precisely for this.
Be suspicious of anything that arrives through social media and offers returns that look better than they should. We wrote a few months ago that sometimes it really is just too good to be true; that hasn’t changed.
And if in doubt, ask to meet. A real firm has a real office and real people who’ll be happy to see you. The fake one will have a very nice picture of a building but nothing else.
Ours, for the record, is in Hook. You’re welcome to visit.
We help people in Hook and across Hampshire, Surrey, Berkshire, Sussex and Kent, and if you ever receive anything claiming to be from us that doesn’t feel right, please call us on the number on our website before you do anything else.
Altor Wealth Management LLP is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA number 769033). Registered office: Landmark House, Station Road, Hook, Hampshire RG27 9HA. This article is general information, not personal advice. Fraud figures are from UK Finance’s Annual Fraud Report 2026, covering 2025.