then there’s the mostly blind eye to attacks on forum members who are disabled &/or claiming benefits…

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=2266309

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=2264665

Looks like Lewis is data mining

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qsw7q

The programme is about credit cards. First Lewis said they can ruin your life, destroy your marriage, all true. Then he went on to do his best to sell cards to BBC listeners by way of his website making big claims that when Vine asked him to be specific about were at best £30 of shopping vouchers.

So we live in a society where we all pay for public service broadcasts that say we should risk everything for a £30 shopping voucher?

He also overstated benefits over debit cards by omitting any mention of Visa Chargeback, which you would do if you were on the BBC to sell credit cards

He went on to be hopelessly biased about Tesco Rewards. His website is an affiliate marketing partner for Tesco Direct. Tesco has lost market share because it is too expensive to shop there for groceries. It has ploughed millions into marketing instead of what most consumers want in the credit crunch which is cheaper prices. Lewis used an example of beef in gravy from 2005 to justify what he told listeners to the BBC in 2010.

Vine in my opinion is far too matey with Lewis. He pretended not to understand Lewis’ dodgy voucher maths, despite being the BBC’s statistician on election nights!

There is something peculiarly ironic that the Martin Lewis fans who were lured into impossible credit card debts by his media talk of how you could transfer your debts between plastic forever so long as you took the debt out via his website, are now having to visit his website again for voucher codes to buy food to ward off bankruptcy.

On the plus side I have noticed his newsletter is no longer described as ad free, but merely spam free, more classic Lewis meaninglessness, and that the free ad free notice at the top of the website is getting smaller. Maybe he finally realises that a site with more advertising than an earthquake appeal probably shouldn’t claim to be ad free.

He had to keep recommending them because his formula was based on two things only – interest rate and compensation. He did not take into account a government’s ability to fund its share of compensation so to introduce this purely for Iceland would have been unfair and by alerting savers might have brought on the collapse that eventually happened.

He has since introduced warnings, when he recommends Irish financial services he includes a warning about the government’s ability to fund its share of compensation so he has recognised the weakness of having very narrow criteria for his tips.

Would you prefer Robert Peston who a lot of people resent for broadcasting about Northern Rock. Peston says that journalism reports what it knows and it is not his job to edit out criteria.

Both journalists but very different approach to j0urnalism. Peston has certainly come in for more criticsm and fierce examination by the Treasury Select Committee whereas the committe and the leaders of all main political parties views Lewis as something of a hero.

I’ve no axe to grind against his site and general approach, good luck to him – he’s not perfect, but he’s generally got it spot on.

However, this is crass. Why? Because he’s acting as if he’s donating to charity when in fact these sign ups are costing him no more than normal – he’s using the Haiti crisis to succeed commercially, and that’s crass in my opinion. If he wanted to donate to charity he’d donate the full value of the subscriptions £5+? (I have no idea but it’s way more than 50p).

Profiteering from disaster feels crass to me.

Many businesses could have followed his model here but surely most would have found it morally repugnant.

More to the point, this nonsense about his ‘bad advice’ on the Icelandic banks has gone on long enough. While I don’t think his website is perfect and quite frankly he gets on my nerves, people who claim he talked up the likes of Icesave or didn’t give people the warnings they needed about Icelandic economy stability are simply W-R-O-N-G.

There were warnings on MoneySavingExpert.com for many months about Iceland, and MSE was also the first website to produce a comprehensive guide to savings safety. For a long while, the only other place to get information on the Financial Services Compensation Scheme was from the government – and lord knows they hardly put the facts in laymans’ terms.

The reality is that most Martin Lewis moaners are suffering from an acute, almost pathological, case of sour grapes. If you put as much effort into actually DOING something instead of sniping at a complete stranger, maybe some of you old winge-bags would also have a few million quid in the bank.

He is well and truly a prat..

Quick question to George, You won’t be calling me an ilk will you?

On to the fight..

“You don’t seem to be able to take responsibility for your own actions. Who signs up for a bank account without checking that the facilities offered are the ones that you want? Did you not check that you qualified for the 0% overdraft? Clearly you don’t read the small print.”

If I am responsible then what are banks paying Martin for? If I have to check the terms before taking out an account, why do I need to go back to Martin’ site to take out the account, what am I clicking the links that help for?

Martin’s advice has cost me money and I have no means to complain so my view of him is negative. Just because you don’t agree does not mean I don’t have a right of free speech. It is pompous threatening people who express a view that is different to yours with libel in the hope you will shut them up.

People think that Martin is on TV and in the newspapers to tell them about the small print. Elvira, point me to where he has told the public what they would expect a consumer champion and money expert to tell them about the terms on A&L’s 0% overdraft?

I have the standard rejection letter from A&L that it sends out when you apply for the overdraft facility, so I know all the conditions now.

You apply for the overdraft to match the one you have after you have opened the account. If Martin was telling people what they needed to know, they could run their account for a month before applying for an A&L account so they had a bank statement that met A&L’s conditions.

I would not advise this account for people on low incomes, as Martin does. My advice is based on my experience and I have not been paid to share it. Martin has been paid by the bank as far as I can work out from the misleading reference to links that help. For people on low incomes consider a basic bank account, the sort of bank account that never gets promoted by Martin, a bank account which is not paying anyone to take it out because it is not a profitable account for banks.

This is what he should have told the public if he wants to be a consumer champion and a business:

1. All the terms of the overdraft, there are many
2. Why A&L is paying £100 to attract new customers
3. Why is it paying £50.00 cashback. What does it know about the profit/loss it is making from the 1 million customers it has on this account that has made it increase the incentives it is offering to sign up more accounts?
4. What the account costs customers on average in real life. Is it costing people a lot in charges because they have no overdraft facility, is this why the bank pays £100 plus £50.00 cashback, because they can see from all the information they have that it is worth paying £150 to attract people on low incomes because in practice the account is earning them £150 back in charges within months and then they are in profit. If a lot of people taking out this account are low paid, and that’s how Martin sells this account, then the bank is paying very little interest on deposits, is providing few customers with any overdraft at all and is making a lot from charges. The bank tells us why we should take out this account. The only thing Martin needs to tell us is the things we do not know like the percentage who have a 0% overdraft and what the average charges are on running this account.
4. The bank is owned by Santander, a Spanish bank. Spain is on the same list as Greece, Portugal and Ireland.

“How he makes money is explained quite clearly on the website. You could also get a copy of the accounts lodged at Companies House.”

Not true.

“I’d be delighted if it made me a billionaire, providing it never compromises my ethics and recommendations.”

Who wants to have £1 billion for themselves? I don’t understand that way of thinking. It is just alien to me when I know how many poor people there are in this country, the idea that one person thinks they should have £1 billion. Why does anyone need £1 billion?

It is individuals on Wall Street, the people who ran Iceland’s banks, anyone who desires to have £1 billion, that have brought capitalism to its knees, made Western democracies less governable through their gross inequalities and led to a shift in the balance of world power in favour of dictatorships and non-democratic countries.