He's the Mr Big of the "copycat" websites that have fleeced thousands of unwary consumers, who have wasted hundreds of pounds on services near-identical to those the government provides free.
Guardian Money can reveal that the man behind the controversial taxreturngateway.com site, Stephen Oliver of East Boldon, near Sunderland, also operates a string of sites that have lured people into paying £29 to apply for "Ehics" (European health insurance cards) that are issued free by the NHS; £172 for UK passports that should cost £72.50; and £85 for driving licence renewals that cost £24.50 at the Post Office.
But it is his taxreturngateway.com website – which suspended operations on 28 January amid widespread concern about its activities – that has provoked the most concern in recent weeks. One Guardian Money reader contacted us, after we warned about the site last week, furious at having paid £1,300 in fees to what he believed was the official HM Revenue & Customs website. Another read our story "with an increasing sense of dread", realising that he had just lost £500.
Tracing the people behind taxreturngateway.com is no easy job. The site is the trading name for Who4 Ltd, which gives its location as St John Street in London, although that is simply a maildrop address shared by more than 30,000 companies. Who4 was set up in April 2012 with three directors, James Wyatt, Michael Hughes and Stephen Oliver, all with addresses in the north-east of England.
Oliver has the most connections to other copycat websites. At Companies House he is listed as a current or past director of eight active or dissolved companies, and gives his occupation as "gentleman".
He is a director of Caveat Viator, which runs drivinglicence.uk.com; EuropHealth Ltd, which runs the European Health Insurance Card Online Service; and Who4 which, apart from taxreturngateway.com, operates passport-uk.com, Esta Visa Application Services, which charges £79 to apply for a US visa that is $14 (£8.45) on the official site, and the National Insurance Registration Online Service which charges £130 for an NI number (which is free when applying at the official site). Interestingly for a service that says it will check and send your tax return, Who4 Ltd is listed at Companies House as being overdue in filing its own accounts.
Oliver is a hard man to track down. Guardian Money has repeatedly emailed taxreturngateway.com with no response. So we called at the address in East Boldon, Sunderland, that Oliver gave to Companies House in April 2012, but neighbours said he no longer lives there.
In February last year Oliver told the Daily Mirror, which was investigating reader complaints about passport-uk.com, that the site had been cleared by "Google and British trading standards", and "we don't try to mislead anybody – other sites do. We provide a service and we have lots of positive feedback".
When we contacted trading standards in Sunderland it said it had received a number of complaints about taxreturngateway.com and was investigating – which may give hope to readers seeking to get their money back. It may also help explain the mystery of taxreturngateway's halt in trading on 28 January. It put a message on the site: "Due to heavy demand we are unable to accept any further applications." The following day the "Due to heavy demand" line was removed. We asked Google and HMRC if they had prevailed upon the company to halt trading, but neither would confirm or deny it, although the site no longer tops the page on Google's search results for "tax return" and "self assessment".
Google is coming under increasing pressure over taking money to promote copycat websites. Among the more printable comments sent to us this week from readers who have fallen for taxreturngateway.com was: "I believe Google is implicated in this as it is well aware of what's happening and why – and it too should be prosecuted". Others ask why Google couldn't at least move copycat sites to below the official sites on its search results page.
Former shadow home secretary David Davis has tabled a number of questions in the House of Commons to find out how much these websites have cost consumers, what action is being taken, and how much profit Google is making from them.
Home office minister Mark Harper says the Government Digital Service "is leading a cross-government exercise with organisations such as the Office of Fair Trading, the Advertising Standards Authority, search engine providers (including Google) and various trading standards bodies to curtail the activity of websites that advertise their services in misleading ways".
Transport for London has taken out adverts in London newspapers to warn drivers about copycat congestion-charge paying sites, while the opening page of the HM Passport Office has an alert about charges by rogue companies.
But it's likely that copycat sites will continue to trap consumers in a hurry,, who fail to carefully read information on the opening page of a site. Most sites now comply with Google and ASA rules by placing messages on their home page that they are not the official service provider.
The ASA said it has received more than 50 complaints about taxreturngateway from web users who said the site was misleading because it implied it was the official HMRC tax submission site. But in a statement to Guardian Money, the ASA said: "We have carefully considered the complaints but on this occasion we don't consider that there's a problem under the advertising rules. The sponsored online ad makes no reference to taxreturngateway being 'official'. The website makes sufficiently clear the service on offer and the fact that there are extra costs involved if one chooses to use their service." It added that in the past it had required Who4 to remove the word "official" from its passport-uk.com site. Additional reporting: Joshua Shrimpton-Dean
