We were conned, bloody hell...

A couple of weeks ago we took a phone call in the office from a "Mr Khan" who wanted to buy some product from us, he came around to see us and took away several items leaving us with a cheque for £940 - its been returned unpaid by the bank.

We had his business address which is in a nearby town and so my brother went to pay him a visit only to find that a builder was on the premises redeveloping the building, the builder was owed a lot more money by Mr Khan than we were and gave my brother a phone number for the landlord of the building who was owed more money again.

The landlord told us that he was collecting a dossier of all the complaints againts his former tenant and was intending to present the facts to the police, so far he'd found fraud in the sum total of arund £68,000.

Last week he presented his findings to the police including the last known address of Mr Khan and on Monday the landlord rang me to give me the name and nunber of the CID officer that was dealing with the case.

I've just spoken to the officer today and he has told me that they will not be proceeding a case against Mr Khan as his misdemenour appears to be in the "civil domain", in the eyes of the police he has not obtained goods by deception, merely obtained goods then failed to pay his account - a civil matter that means that each individual company concerned has to persue Mr Khan through the civil courts to get their money, he then concluded by warning me that he knew of one company who had taken Mr Khan to court on three occasions in order to enforce an original order to make payments to them.

All of which means that we have to write off £940, I have no intention of taking the matter to a civil court as the procedure will cost more money and ultimately lead nowhere. We have been down this route before, have sued company's for money owed to us, have obtained a court ruling in our favour, and have collected the sum of precisely nothing as a result.

All that a court order does in these circumstances is confirm to you that the person owes you the money, well whoppee-fuckin-doo, we already know that, after receiving the court order (which you have to pay for of course) you can, if you wish, then try and enforce the order by trying to find the person concerned (paying someone else to do this for you) and then dragging them to court to get a promise to pay, or alternatively sending the bailiffs to the offenders premises to take goods to the value of his debt to you, both procedures cost you more money and ultimately lead you nowhere.

The court system is a huge joke when it comes to business debts, a judgment in your favour is not even worth the cost of the paper its printed on.

All of which means that Mr Khan has got away with his seven days of theiving from gullible company's, and yes I admit we were gullible, maybe he caught us with our guard down, yes we know we should have waited for his cheque to clear before releasing the goods, it won't happen again, and it wouldn't have happened inthe first place if my dad was still alive and running the business, then again he was racist and wouldn't have dealt with someone called Khan in the first place, or at least only if cash was involved. In this case, and it hurts to say this, but he was probably right.

Hey-ho, such is the roller coaster ride that is running a business in the UK in 2006.