So, a recap – I’d applied for a Job on Universal Jobmatch, attended the interview with the affably evil John Sothern in Manchester and been offered the place, however I had to pay £65 for a DBS check which never took place. The company – Options4Families- doesn’t exist, John Sothern is not a trained counsellor with a tragic work background, those sexually abused children are fictional devices to sell his scam. For that full post, please click here
Also, I’m unsure of the etiquette of naming people in blog posts – so I’ve refrained from doing so, aside from John Sothern himself of course. However, I couldn’t have found out what I did, without social media and the people willing to name and shame John Sothern for his fraudulent activities. So here we go…Mr John Sothern, this is your life!
“Won’t someone please think of those fictional children?”
It didn’t take long for doubt to set in after I’d sent off the payment. On a whim I searched Facebook for any other employees of Options4Families. Sure enough, there were none, which is always a bad sign. I also searched Twitter, where I found almost no mention of them –you’d think an organisation that counsels children and doesn’t ask for a fee would gain some attention.
However, I did see one tweet concerning Options4Families, from a woman who had also been contacted for interview by Sothern – however when she arrived at Manchester One she discovered Sothern had left the premises with the police not far behind him.
At this point, I rang the number supplied by the Options4Families site, immediately I heard a dead dial tone. I really can’t describe how I felt at this point, I’d always thought I was pretty sharp when it came to con artists (see my post about Asha Solanki and her alleged lover Carl Wright), but Sothern had beaten my senses with his personable talk and seemingly frank attitude.
At my next Job Centre appointment I told my advisor about the situation. Her reaction was best summed up as a shrug and a ‘better luck next time’ – which perhaps isn’t the best image to give out when it was a Government website that allowed John Sothern to advertise his scam. Needless to say, the DWP are not going to get out of this situation easily – Iain Duncan Smith has already been contacted by my MP Andy Burnham to find out how something like this can happen repeatedly.
Oh yes, I said repeatedly, as it turns out that the DWP knew Sothern was a con artist since early December – after he was allowed to hold interviews within the Birkenhead Job Centre branch under the name of Options4Families, for yet more jobs that didn’t exist. However, despite this, he was still able to post his fraudulent advertisements well into January, when many others and myself applied.
Digital Donna
I did a little digging with the invoice supplied to me by ‘Donna Phelps’, the address listed in the fine print belongs to a ‘Digital Office’, which in itself is a shady avenue. Digital Offices are set up in prestigious addresses – in this instance London- and can be hired out to companies who want to appear a little bigger and important than they actually are. Or in Options4Families case, a little less fictional. At these Digital Offices, for a fee, the workers will answer correspondences with customers, posing as your employees. Whether the Digital Office was actually in on the scam is unknown, it’s possible Sothern simply used their address and –like many things- conjured the phone number out of thin air. The same could be said of Donna Phelps, there’s a slim chance it was some unwitting worker at a Digital Office taking care of emails for Options4Families – although I find it far more likely that it was Sothern himself.
Burnley & Pendle Children in Need; A Disturbing Trend
As an aside, the phone number featured on the Options4Families site appears in one other place on the internet. Another –presumably- fraudulent site called Burnley & Pendle Children in Need, it would appear Mr Sothern likes to use disadvantaged children to his advantage.
Serial Checker, Or, How to Fail at Marketing
For all his attempts to cover his tracks, John Sothern had made the mistake of appearing in the Burnley Express claiming to be an entrepreneurial victim of burglary who had since invented an app to track stolen goods. The news article from October last year –since deleted after people, including myself contacted the paper- claimed that Sothern was looking to recruit 15 young people to work various roles within his ‘business.’ It’s not a wild leap of the imagination to assume that these roles never materialised. If one takes a look at the apps somewhat lacklustre Twitter feed it’s obvious that Sothern’s business sense isn’t as sharply tuned as his ability to scam people. He resorted to spamming celebrities – particularly footballers for some reason- claiming that people were absolutely flocking to this app and it had received amazing feedback from the public and police. Serial Checker went under soon after and this twitter feed is now the only remnant of it on the internet.
It’s also worth noting, that the image of the Serial Checker website, featured in John Sothern’s now widely circulated picture (see above) suggests that it was exactly the same layout and colour scheme as the Options4Families website – apparently Sothern believed he’d found a winning formula, and stuck to it. Which leads me nicely onto the next segment…
Digging further through John Sothern’s past, one finds themselves in the somewhat odd area of ‘Life In..’ magazines, where he is listed as the managing director and editor of the companies Cheshire publication, see here.
John Sothern; Happier, More Pixely, Times
Of course, it is exactly the same layout and colour scheme as the Options4Families site and long deceased Serial Checker. There is also a Mr John Parks listed as the senior sales executive, this is a name multiple people have confirmed that Sothern operated under while interviewing for Options4Families. Also, tickling my suspicion that none of these people other than Sothern actually exist, one of the people listed as working at the company is a Suzanne Blurrgh – did he run out of ideas for last names?
Like every other site set up by John Sothern, the Life in Magazines features a handy Google Maps widget which pinpoints exactly where the office is supposedly located. In the case of this company, it appears to be a car park in Birkenhead. Likewise, the Birmingham branch of Options4Families also apparently doubles as a Bar & Grill, while the London office seemingly shares space with a Chauffeur company. Also, the Burnley branch of 24/7 Cash for Gold should really be commemorated for helping children in need from the Burnley and Pendle area.
I found one issue of Life in Cheshire, from 2012, available to read online, featuring a poorly written editorial courtesy of John Sothern himself. The rest of the magazine appeared to be written by young freelance writers desperate to get a foot in the door. Unfortunately for them, it appears John Sothern is only interested in helping himself. When I discovered the Life In… website, I’d wracked my brains trying to work out what con he could have been angling for. It was eventually made clear to me on the 10th of Febuary -oddly enough, the day I was supposedly due to start work at Options4Families. Apparently, when not undergoing more fake interviews -his latest being at the beginning of February in London- John Sothern has been finding the time to contact businesses in Cumbria and offering to sell them advertising space. He seems to accomplish this by playing off peoples familiarity with the County Life range of magazines – it could be an easy mistake to make over the phone. However, this has come to the attention of Cumbria Life’s editor, so hopefully that will be yet another scam abandoned by John Sothern.
I hope through the duration of this rather long post, you’ve come to realise that the man known to many as the rather personable John Sothern (or indeed, John Parks) is a serial con artist, of an almost compulsive nature. It’s evident he has little in the way of conscience, as it seems all too easy for him to conjure up young and tragic victims…of whom, of course, he is the saviour.
Despite garnering three articles from the Liverpool Echo, and one victim of his cons sending every person on his Facebook friends list (the profile now deleted of course) a link to the aforementioned news stories, John Sothern has continued to travel the country, ripping off the vulnerable and hopeful. However, not for much longer; the MP’s for Birkenhead and Leigh are both contacting the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the Police and Fraud Squad know all about his actions. Just this evening I spoke to a reporter from the Manchester Evening News who is eager to interview me, and some of his other victims have already spoken to their local papers.
Undoubtedly John Sothern’s time will come, because, as he will soon learn, it’s impossible to get away with anything in the age of social media. And unemployed people tend to have a lot of time on their hands…
Job Centre Blues 