The Financial Conduct Authority warned about crestempress.com on 12 December 2025. The firm was soliciting people in the United Kingdom. The only address it gave was in Albany, New Zealand — roughly 11,000 miles away.

What the FCA published

A plain unauthorised-firm warning, first published and last updated 12 December 2025. The wording is the FCA’s standard formula: “This firm may be providing or promoting financial services or products without our permission. You should avoid dealing with this firm and beware of scams.”

The notice records the website crestempress.com, an email address, and one physical location: Triton Drive, Albany, New Zealand, 0757. No telephone number is listed.

Distance is a feature, not a detail

Consider what a New Zealand address does for an operation taking money from people in Britain.

It puts the firm outside the reach of every UK protection at once. The Financial Ombudsman Service cannot adjudicate against it. The Financial Services Compensation Scheme does not cover it. UK courts are a practical impossibility for an individual chasing a few thousand pounds across the Pacific. Even a solicitor’s letter becomes an exercise in international service of process.

It also creates a permanent excuse. Time zones explain slow replies. Distance explains why nobody can visit. “Our compliance team is in New Zealand” answers most questions a nervous customer might ask, and answers them without revealing anything.

None of this requires the operation to be in New Zealand at all. An address on a notice is a claim, not a fact — and with no phone number to test it against, there was nothing a customer could check independently before sending money.

Dead within nine months

We checked crestempress.com on 11 September 2026. It returns DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN. No DNS record exists.

The warning was published in December 2025. The domain was gone by September 2026 — under nine months from regulator notice to abandonment, which is among the shortest lifespans we have documented.

A short life means a disposable build. Nothing was invested that could not be walked away from: no office, no phone line, no company that had to be dissolved. Only a domain registration and an inbox, both of which end the moment somebody stops paying.

What to take from it

An overseas address on a firm approaching UK customers is not automatically a fraud marker — plenty of legitimate international businesses serve British clients. What matters is authorisation. A foreign firm doing regulated business with people in the UK still needs FCA permission, and crestempress did not have it.

So the question is never “where are they?” It is “are they authorised here?” — and that is answered on the FCA register in under a minute, whatever address a website displays.

REPORT A SCAM FAST

Every operation solves the address problem differently. Oriontero rented a Canary Wharf postcode and two London numbers, while Zentra Capital gave the regulator no address or phone at all.

Our verdict

An address on the other side of the world, no phone number, and nine months of life. Everything about this operation was designed to be out of reach before anyone thought to reach for it.

Check authorisation before geography. The register is the only address that matters.

If you sent money to crestempress.com, contact your bank today and report it to Action Fraud. The warning is recent, and payment routes stay traceable long after a domain is dropped.

Sources: FCA warning notice for crestempress.com, published 12 December 2025, read directly at fca.org.uk; DNS lookup on crestempress.com, 11 September 2026.