Sally says: 

You have had a most frustrating experience with this forex training company. First, being lured in with a soft sell about how you were one of the lucky ones to get a huge discount on the online courses they offer, and then being encouraged to click on a link without, in my view, adequate warning of consequences for your payment. It meant that without realising it you had instantly waved goodbye to the £3,000 or so you had paid.

You had no time to reflect on your purchase and properly take advantage of the 14-day cooling off period. Although you quickly realised you did not want to use Learn to Trade’s courses and tried to cancel, it held you to the small print under the “Let’s start” button that stated you would lose “your right of withdrawal from the content once the download or streaming had begun”. 

The full meaning of this nasty catch (that is, why you were told you would not be seeing your money again) was buried within its many pages of Ts & Cs. Despite your polite but increasingly insistent requests, your refund pleas were rejected.

I took up the cudgels on your behalf. At first it seemed Learn to Trade felt it was beneath it to discuss your case with me directly. It simply copied me into another reply to you that again denied you a refund with the words “your query to cancel has been closed”.

I made further attempts at making contact, including calling Vincent, your “mentor”, directly, but he never answered his phone.

I tried numerous times and for several days in a row, finally leaving a message on his answer machine without much hope of receiving a return call.

Perhaps that message triggered some action, as a few days later, now about two weeks since you first got in touch with me for help, the firm responded to me by name to inform me it was “liaising directly” with you and trying to provide a satisfactory outcome “reflective of the terms and conditions of sale which comply with consumer regulations”.

Meanwhile, I spoke to financial expert Alan Smith, of wealth manager Capital Asset Management, about these types of forex courses widely advertised online.

He had sage words. He suggested that although you might have handed over £3,000 to this firm now, by going no further with the courses you will have saved yourself from the likelihood of much deeper losses from the trading that inevitably would have followed. Individuals do not actually trade in physical currencies but in risky “Contracts for Difference”, or CFDs, which are essentially bets on price movements between pairs of currencies.

Mr Smith said: “Very few people make money from this kind of high-risk trading, and those who sign up for courses like these are like lambs to the slaughter. It is close to gambling and the chances of getting it right are slim, even for the experts. If there was money to be made these companies would be doing it through trading themselves rather than selling courses.”

Indeed, Learn to Trade founder Greg Secker has made a fortune from running forex courses.

He presents himself as a charitable figure, running a foundation in his own name. On the Learn to Trade website he drops the names of well known entrepreneurs and philanthropists that he associates with, including Richard Branson.

Mr Smith’s warnings about the risky nature of this type of trading are even backed up by the broker Capital Index, to which Learn to Trade points customers to carry out their forex trades (also founded by Mr Secker). When I logged on to its website, a risk warning appeared on the home page: “84pc of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs and spread bets with this provider”.

With Learn to Trade resisting a refund, I suggested you raise a chargeback claim with your bank, HSBC, as you had used your bank card to pay for this unwanted course. A few days later HSBC repaid the £3,064 into your account.

This did not mean you were out of the woods as it takes 45 days to find out if a retailer’s bank will accept or reject such a claim. The money could be taken back.

At about the same time you received a surprise email from Learn to Trade saying it would now consider refunding you – so long as you accepted a confidentiality agreement. I did not like the sound of this, and neither did you, so I suggested you did nothing until we heard the outcome of your chargeback claim.

Learn to Trade then emailed you again to withdraw its refund offer for the time being as it had become aware of the chargeback request.