Katie and Matt had just returned from some winter sun in Jordan when, at 10pm on a Tuesday, they found themselves standing outside Gatwick airport, frantically calling the firm they had entrusted their car keys to a week earlier. It had been an amazing holiday but the two junior doctors were eager to get home: Matt had a shift at 8am the next morning in Oxford. When they called 365 VALET LTD, the company which had offered the meet and greet parking service, they say they were told that that an employee would return with their vehicle within five minutes.
By midnight, their car still hadn’t arrived. They went in search of it and, though it was supposed to have been driven off the short-stay car park where they’d left it, the car was still there—and they had accrued £450 worth of parking charges. The keys, though, were with 365 VALET LTD. They had called the company “over twenty times in those two hours,” Matt says, until eventually 365 VALET LTD admitted that they couldn’t find their key, and claimed they didn’t have time to look for it. The couple were beginning to get stressed. They’d used a meet-and-greet car parking service in the past and it had been smooth and easy. Perhaps they were just unlucky this time?
Around a month later, Alex* was also standing outside Gatwick at midnight with his family, making a call to the firm that had picked up his car a week earlier, just before he and his wife and children boarded a flight to Marrakech. Alex felt uneasy when he had dropped the car off: he says the man who met him hadn’t presented him with any paperwork and had been cagey about having his photo taken with the car and keys. But Alex, rushing to get the flight, reassured himself that everything would be fine. He was, it turns out, never to see his car again. 365 VALET LTD would eventually admit that the car had been stolen by a disgruntled former employee. Alex made a claim on his insurance for a new car. His original car would be recovered by the police months later in West Sussex.
Across the country, at Gatwick, Heathrow and Manchester, travellers are having terrible experiences with parking services. Some are finding mud inside their cars. Others find hundreds of miles have appear on their dashboards. Some have returned to find their rear lights broken. Yet others discover that their car has disappeared altogether.
Some have returned to their cars to find the rear lights broken
Complaints about 365 VALET LTD posted on social media and review sites sometimes mention a much bigger, “price-comparison website” called Ezybook.co.uk, which offers services across England. There’s even a Facebook group dedicated to impassioned, critical reviews. There are hundreds of posts, some of them in capitals: “DO NOT EVER USE THIS COMPANY”, reads one. Group members say they have booked meet-and-greet parking through Ezybook only to receive an unsatisfactory service, including damage done to their vehicles, or unexplained mileage. And so with all these complaints racking up, several frustrated Facebook posters have asked: how are firms like Ezybook and 365 VALET LTD still allowed to trade? We put these allegations in full to Ezybook and they did not comment.
The answer may appear technical and complex. That is because, in part, it is about Britain’s broken company law regime and the ease with which scammers and criminals are able to use shell companies to facilitate everyday fraud that adds misery to ordinary people’s lives, as well headline-grabbing money laundering and white-collar crime. It is also about contract law, and how charlatans like Ezybook.co.uk can manipulate the principles of the law in a way that makes it confusing and difficult for customers to pursue claims.
But the answer is also, in another way, very simple. Ezybook is operating in a post-austerity environment where the institutions that should protect consumers are broken. Government cutbacks have run Trading Standards offices, which exist across the country, into the ground. And as a result, it is incredibly difficult for people to access justice through our small claims court. The question is, will new legislation—the new Economic Crime and Transparency Act 2023—stop this happening?
To begin to unravel it, we first need to return to Matt and Katie, standing in the car park in the dark without their keys.
Katie and Matt’s key did not turn up on the night of the 10th of January. They say they were told over the phone by a male employee of 365 VALET LTD to book themselves into a hotel, the cost of which would be reimbursed by the company in the morning. They say they were also told that their key would be found and returned. Matt was sceptical, while Katie believed the whole thing to be an inconvenience but never feared that her key wouldn’t appear in the morning “or that we would lose any money”. In the end, they booked into the Sofitel opposite the terminal. They tell me that when they went to the front desk and explained the situation, there was a flash of recognition in the eyes of the woman serving them. “This has happened before,” she said.
In the morning, the key still hadn’t appeared. The pair hired a car from the hotel and drove back to Oxford so that Matt could start work. Katie then picked up their spare car key, and drove all the way back to Gatwick to pick up her car. When she called an employee from 365 VALET LTD to meet her, a middle-aged man appeared and drove the car out of the car park, paying the £450 for the days it had been left there. Weeks later, a fine arrived in the post for Katie and Matt: the man had driven the car through a bus lane. The couple had received no communication from 365 VALET LTD, no apology and no written confirmation of the promise to reimburse them. So Matt wrote an email, outlining the cost of replacing the key, staying in the hotel, and the bus lane fine with all their receipts and sent it to 365 VALET LTD’s email address.
Matt received no response (and when we put these allegations in full to 365 VALET LTD, they did not respond). “So, I emailed and called them every single day for about two weeks,” Matt says. He received unpleasant answers if anyone answered the phone at all. “Oh, my manager’s not in,” was a common refrain, before eventually they were just told to “fuck off.” The aggression was stressful, Matt says. Some £900 down, without their car key or reimbursement for their hotel, Katie and Matt wanted to get their money back. To work out who they were up against, they turned to Companies House.
The rules for incorporation of firms on Companies House are being changed in gradual phases by the Economic Crime Act 2023, which came into force in March 2024. But when 365 VALET LTD was incorporated on 16th March 2022, a limited liability business could be registered on Companies House for just £12, without the need for company directors to submit any official identification or any evidence proving the company genuinely occupies its registered address.
The legislation was originally aimed at tackling high-level fraud and money laundering, particularly that of Russian oligarchs in London. The tactics used by oligarchs and business tycoons to hide their billions, however, can also be used by those wishing to create a layer of opaqueness around smaller-scale dodgy business practices. “Whether a shell company is being used to launder millions of pounds for an oligarch or if it’s being used to hide a fraudster’s identity who’s looking to steal people’s cars, the nub of the issue is that these faceless entities are being used to shield people from accountability,” explains Ben Cowdock, senior UK investigations lead at Transparency International, as forming shell companies has previously been entirely legal.
365 VALET LTD is an example of a company that hides from accountability, where both the company and its director’s sole registered address is a coworking space which is also used as a “company factory”—at the time of writing almost 44,000 companies are registered to it.
Those who have run Ezybook over the years appear also to have used shell companies—in fact during the nine years that Ezybook as a website has been trading, the registered company listed as its owner has changed several times, from Acrologix LTD to SMART TRAVEL DEALS LTD, to GO PARK AND FLY LTD to COMPARE PARKING PRICES LTD to COMPAREWITHUS LIMITED, which is what it is trading under now. Each of these shell companies was registered to the address of one of several company factories—an address at which sometimes thousands of other companies are also listed—and the same address is used both for the registered company and for the director’s correspondence. One of these companies, GO PARK AND FLY LTD was compulsorily struck off the Companies House register in 2023 after never having filed its accounts. At the time of writing, the filing of accounts is also overdue for Ezybook.co.uk’s current owner, COMPAREWITHUS LIMITED.
Between strike-off and dissolutions, the company trail behind the website makes it difficult for customers of Ezybook.co.uk to keep track of who they are dealing with, and can create confusion about who is accountable for complaints and issues they may have.
Matt and Katie were looking into 365 VALET LTD on Companies House because they had decided to pursue the money they were owed through the small claims court. Matt applied using the online small claims service, hoping to recover a debt of £822.99 for the cost of the car keys and hotel, and £70 for the cost of the court fee. No one ever responded to their claim, and a county court judgment (CCJ) was sent to Matt in his favour on 2nd March 2023. Matt says he was “pretty happy, to be honest, I thought we were then getting our money back.” But when he emailed a copy to 365 VALET LTD, hoping they would pay up, he heard nothing back. “I carried on emailing them or calling them and—nothing.”
A county court judgement is an enforceable civil order, and for citizens and consumers it is the only means of proving in the civil law that they are owed money. It is the primary mechanism for enforcing a citizen’s rights in the private sphere. Matt and Katie decided to go to Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) for help. They were told that there were ways a CCJ might be enforced if a company is refusing to pay, but realised that none of these options were realistically available to them if they didn’t know where 365 VALET LTD held its assets, what his bank details were or how to find the company’s sole director (they only had his name and the address of a rented coworking space). “How is the court actually going to track him down?” Katie says. “Does he even exist?”
When a citizen can get a court order declaring that they are legally entitled to be paid, but has no means of enforcing that order, the rule of law is undermined. “I was actually shocked that in the UK, we have a system where people can get away with stuff like this.” Matt says. “I just had no idea that people could just get away with criminal activity.”
While operating as an active company (which it is at the time of writing), 365 VALET LTD has accrued 12 confirmed unsatisfied CCJs against its name in England and Wales, meaning that a court has officially found it owes 12 debts that it hasn’t paid. The debts vary from £616 to £8,455. The first judgment was issued in 2022, not long after 365 VALET LTD was registered to Companies House. And yet, months later and despite several customers having sued 365 VALET LTD in court, Ezybook was still hosting the company on its site. Customers—including Alex’s family—were able to book the firm using Ezybook in February 2023. Is Ezybook partly to blame?
Ezybook consistently holds itself out to be a comparison site and booking agent whenever it is challenged by customer complaints. “We believe in serving our customers with deals proposed by numerous high quality and distinctive dealers,” reads the About Us text on their website. On that last point they’re telling the truth: few could argue that 365 VALET LTD are not distinctive. But the rest of their argument doesn’t quite hold up.
Price comparison sites direct users to other websites, through which you can book products or services. But on Ezybook, customers book with the site directly. That’s what Lyndsay, another user of Ezybook I spoke to did, when she booked the services of Express Parking Heathrow LTD.
Lyndsay applied for a CCJ against Express Parking Heathrow LTD after she returned from a trip to India to find that her car had a smashed rear light, damage to the alloys and was filthy inside with mud on the mats.
When she raised the issue with Ezybook over email, cc’ing Express Parking Heathrow LTD, she received replies from Ezybook saying that they are only the booking agent, and she should take up her complaint with Express Parking Heathrow LTD themselves. But she says Express Parking Heathrow never replied to any of her emails. In the end Lyndsay submitted a money claim online against Express Parking Heathrow LTD for the value of £1,474, and won a CCJ after they failed to submit a defence. Lyndsay also found her judgement unenforceable as there were no people accepting documents at the company’s official address, nor any assets she could apply for a bailiff to seize.
Lyndsay went back to Ezybook and argued that it was now appropriate for her to make a claim against them, after the company they contract with had refused to acknowledge her court order. She told them, “You’re operating with a contractor that is not responding to its clients. So therefore, as long as you continue to operate and sell their services I’m going to put my claim on you.” But Ezybook replied reiterating their argument that they are a just the booking agent.
By obscuring the relationship between themselves and the customer, Ezybook makes it hard for customers to know who to pursue with any complaints. Ezybook plays the “good cop”, directing complaints towards subcontractors, but they never answer emails or the phone. Doing so allows Ezybook to continue to pose as a legitimate comparison site, just “hosting” dodgy operators who act beyond their control—and no-one in the operation ends up having to pay out for any legal claim.
Unison warned that cuts to trading standards budgets would threaten consumer safety
Ezybook has taken advantage of contract law so as to shield itself from liability for the services which it appears to promote. Because customers technically contract with a separate legal company then it is difficult for a customer to obtain a legal remedy against Ezybook. Commercial solicitor David Allen Green explains that such a configuration is not unusual and that it can be designed for the very purpose of making it hard for customers to get proper legal redress. “In situations where it is not clear who the actual provider is,” Green adds, “an aggrieved customer should consider taking action in the small claims court against the parties jointly.”
Still, this is little help to Lyndsay, who is unsure whether she has any options left. Even if she did manage to make the argument to the court that she has a contract with the company behind Ezybook, she would run into the same problems as Matt and Katie did in getting a CCJ enforced.
“It’s so frustrating,” she says “Whilst I’m not a Samaritan, there is a part of me that says, Companies House has this address listed. Their [Express Parking Heathrow’s] address is listed quite plainly on the website, yet you can’t send a letter to it. How can the government allow companies to continue trading when there are several small claims against them?” A check of the records against Express Parking Heathrow LTD reveals three unsatisfied records against them. When we asked Express Parking Heathrow LTD to comment on these allegations, they did not respond.
Lyndsay is unsure whether she has any options left
Local councils have a statutory responsibility to enforce fair trading, combat illegal trading and monitor product safety under their public protection duties. But in recent years, with a £4bn deficit in council funding across the country, councils’ trading standards offices have felt the pinch. In 2013, Unison warned that cuts to trading standards budgets would threaten consumer safety, and its warnings were not heeded. From 2010 to 2023 trading standards budgets were cut by 50 per cent. Another unhappy customer, who preferred to remain nameless, told me that he found it impossible to speak to a trading standards officer at Hillingdon council, where Heathrow is based. When he tried to report Express Parking Heathrow to Hillingdon Trading Standards, he was referred straight to the Citizens Advice Bureau, who advised him to pursue a money claim through the civil court.
Trading standards offices have a totally different remit of responsibilities to the CAB—while the CAB seeks redress for individual consumers, trading standards prosecutes businesses that commit malpractice—and so, in passing consumers on to the CAB, trading standards may not be investigating reports of illegal trading on their own terms. Hillingdon council responded to say that referral to the Citizens Advice Consumer Service (CACS) is standard practice across the country and that if an offence is believed to have taken place CACS refer it to the appropriate trading standards service for consideration which may lead to action including a full investigation.
When I contacted West Sussex Trading Standards in relation to parking operators at Gatwick in 2023, they confirmed that they had then taken no formal action against 365 VALET LTD.
When the Economic Crime and Transparency Act comes fully into force, Companies House will be better able to verify the identities of company directors, remove fraudulent organisations and share information with law enforcement agencies. Company directors and persons with significant control will have to have their identity formally verified as part of the company formation process, and by 2025, the directors of existing firms will have to do the same. In provisions that have already kicked in, companies will be obliged to provide a registered office address where correspondence can be sent and would be expected to come to the attention of company officers—PO boxes and company farms will no longer be allowed. Companies will also have to provide email addresses and will be expected to acknowledge receipt of messages. This would make it easier for the court to find a director on whom to serve legal papers.
The legislation may have been originally aimed at tackling higher-level fraud, but could it have the happy side effect of preventing the kind of everyday malpractice that Matt, Katie, Lyndsay, and Alex have been victims of?
For Ben Cowdock from Transparency International, the answer is maybe. Much of the act is promising, he says: “I think in terms of how much it [the act] empowers Companies House to check information, it’s a big improvement, because at the moment, they are literally unable to scrutinise the information themselves, and query it.” But any legislation is only as good as its enforcement, he argues. “If Companies House are suddenly able to root out all these shell companies and be able to identify them, then the next step is law enforcement and regulators being able to shut down these rogue operators. So, it creates a framework for a better system, but that better system relies on enforcement.”
For Katie and Matt, Lyndsay and Alex, the changes to the law are of little consolation. At the end of an ordeal that lasted weeks, Alex ended up getting a new car through his insurance claim. But though he is a calm and measured man, the experience has clearly affected him—at one point during our conversation he became concerned that I might be an operator from Ezybook rather than a journalist.
While everyday fraud may rarely make headlines, a country without a functioning system for rooting out charlatans like 365 VALET LTD and Express Parking Heathrow LTD—as well as those masquerading as legitimate comparison websites like Ezybook—is a country where its citizens feel less secure.
