Ben Affleck fans with an eye on the markets should dust down their DVDs of Boiler Room, an eight-year-old film now newly relevant in these uncertain times.

Boiler rooms, according to the Financial Services Authority (FSA), are high-pressure sales firms, often based overseas, that target investors illegally, offering them non-tradable, overpriced or even non-existent shares.

They are every bit as much a scam as the strange but dangerous Nigerians who promise you can earn 15% commission for sitting on £10m for them, please forward your bank details.

As Jennifer Hill writes elsewhere, the crunch is prompting thousands to seek out seemingly promising investments away from the mainstream. This is a classic bear-market phenomenon. Trust in shares is evaporating, bonds are boring and may go down too, so the hucksters start selling escape ladders to weird and not so wonderful havens.

Prospecting off the beaten track can be healthy. It makes you rethink your portfolio, clean out the no-hopers, rethink your goals and take a sideways look at possibilities you would otherwise have shrugged aside. However, in opening your mind you can all too easily open the door to the boiler rooms as they make the seductive pitch that you will still be investing on the stock market (even though you won’t) in shares that are invariably worthless.

Jonathan Phelan of the FSA said every year thousands of UK investors lose “shocking” amounts to these firms.

As they are unauthorised, the Financial Services Compensation Scheme cannot help victims. So if you receive a phone call from a smooth-talking share pusher, get their firm’s exact name and say you’ll phone back. The con artist will try to put you under time pressure by suggesting the scam is available for a very short time. Ignore that threat, which no reputable broker would make. Check the FSA website to see if it is authorised or on the black list of 500 known rogues.

Better still, rent the Boiler Room movie and see the pressure these firms apply to their hapless employees. Then you will understand why they will say anything to part you from your money.

Eat your words

Gordon Brown seems to shove his foot in his mouth at every opportunity, and has done so again by telling us: “If we are to get food prices down, we must do more to deal with unnecessary demands, such as by all of us doing more to reduce our food waste.”

It’s the sort of off-the-cuff remark politicians make on endless flights to meaningless conferences, but Brown has been around long enough to know that it would be analysed to death, and not in a flattering way.

He was responding to a survey of food waste, but it is not just a food problem. We have been brainwashed into becoming a throwaway society, from excessive packaging to clothes deemed too last year.

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