Behind every win there is often a story of anguish or heartache – or, at the very least, deep frustration with poor service.

The most common type of case to cross my desk has involved readers being tricked by sophisticated scams. Some lost many thousands of pounds in the process. These could be life-changing sums and the desperate letters and emails I received were from victims who had no other place to turn.

With many of us spending more time at home alone during the pandemic, we became easier targets for fraudsters. They often masqueraded as people we usually trust implicitly, such as the police or our banks, or simply used slick sales techniques.

An example was the case of an elderly man who lost £300,000 over a period of months to scammers using an intricate web of lies to trap him into investing his savings in mostly fictitious foreign exchange trades. After I intervened, his main bank HSBC returned £155,000 and his credit card provider M&S reimbursed £4,000.

Young people did not escape fraudsters’ clutches. In October I reported on the case of a first-time buyer couple who had their £100,000 house deposit stolen by thieves who had intercepted their solicitor’s email, instructing them to change the bank account details for the payment. On my intervention, Nationwide returned the whole sum.

Low-value wins are just as gratifying. Probably the smallest of them all was the case where an elderly woman was being chased unfairly by debt collectors for allegedly not paying £1.99 for a Corgi toy ice cream van. I persuaded the Corgi Club to call off the hounds.

Sometimes there are grey areas with complaints which require lengthy investigation but when the injustice is blindingly obvious to me, I really get the bit between the teeth. One of my favourite successes of 2021 was when a reader had her insurance claim for her injured horse turned down because provider Animal Friends excluded all incidents involving fences.

I thought this was preposterous, especially as the relevant clause was buried deep in the policy documents. Though the insurer stuck to its guns, I wrote of my disgust in my column. The owner sent my article along with her appeal to the Financial Ombudsman Service, which went on to uphold her claim, largely based on how buried this clause had been. The insurer has now repaid her £2,000 vets’ bill.