Property P2P Website First Great National Disappears

First Great National (a P2P lending website, not a train operator!) has joined a small number of other P2P lending website casualties since the industry began in 2005.

The other closed P2P lending companies we know about include GraduRates, YES-Secure and Quakle, which I wrote about in What Happened to Lenders When These P2P Firms Closed?

What are you missing?

Now that FGN is gone, you might be curious to find out what you're missing. Good luck to you.

Jane wrote about First Great National back on 23 January in First Great National Steams Into P2P.

Jane was pretty scathing bout First Great National's marketing, which claimed to be the first P2P lending website offering “security of assets” which blatantly isn't true. It also claimed to “ensure savers and investors achieve market leading returns with guaranteed security.”

We also know very little about how the company selected loans or what loans were on offer. We have never managed to reach the managing director or anyone else at First Great National, and so details of its proposition have been very sparse.

Permanently down or missing in action?

That's why we can't confirm what's happened to the P2P lending website or people who have lent money through it.

All we know is that its website has disappeared for many days, and its facebook and related linkedin accounts have had no activity for months.

Whatever has happened to it, I'm not going to miss it.

Most P2P lending websites aren't like that

Fortunately, the industry has largely got off to a very good start in the UK. The vast majority of people lending their money through P2P are doing so by lending to low-risk borrowers or by lending against quality property.

Don't be lulled into a false sense of security though. More bad eggs will show up. And even the good eggs can turn bad. You could subscribe to 4thWay's newsletter to keep alerted to such things.