Catch Me If You Can? The rise and fall of the Baltic Triangle’s hapless scam artist

How an anonymous website caught out conman Fenir Saba

Dear readers — Fenir Saba came to Liverpool in search of new beginnings. Newcastle, where he lived, had become too hostile, due to ruthless online trolling over his appearance and mockery of his career as an entrepreneur. Admittedly, Fenir had always had a bootstrapping spirit — one person recalls on Facebook that he once tried to flog a goldfish to his teacher in school — so when he arrived here in mid-2020, he quickly began setting up various businesses to avoid the humdrum nine-to-five lifestyle. There was a property group, a rental business, a company that specialised in selling luxury goods like watches — even a brief foray into the world of hospitality. That was, he says, until the trolls returned with a vengeance. 

In January this year, an anonymous website mysteriously appeared online. Titled Sabatage, it accused Fenir of being a scam artist who was running multiple schemes to dupe people into handing over their hard-earned cash: advertising fake properties and pocketing deposits from unsuspecting tenants; taking people’s Rolexes and flogging them in pawn shops. The website’s forum was soon overrun with posts. Dozens of people claimed that Fenir had scammed them out of thousands, and that he’d been reported to Action Fraud and Merseyside Police for his crimes.

An illustration by Jake Greenhalgh 

This is an elaborate and malicious fabrication, Fenir tells me over a coffee on Bold Street. Numerous people have a vendetta against him, he says, most notably an ex-girlfriend back in Newcastle, who orchestrated the creation of the website and teamed up with others in Liverpool to take him down. These bad actors, he says, offered to pay people for information about him. They even leaked his current girlfriend’s nudes. It’s clearly made him paranoid; he’s recording our conversation on the “advice of his solicitor”, he says.

One wonders how Fenir, at just 25 years old, has made so many enemies that they established an entire online forum and a complex web of fake profiles, emails, letters and phone numbers, just to bring him down. It borders on the unbelievable. 

And, perhaps, that’s because it is. 

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Your Post briefing

A 63-year-old from Bootle has become the first person in the world to be given a new medication that could save his eyesight. Steve Gotts is currently at risk of going blind due to diabetic maculopathy, a condition associated with diabetes. He’s being treated at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital as part of a clinical trial, and this week became one of the first of 24 people across the world to be given a dose of a tablet named Danegaptide to reduce the effects of diabetic blindness. 

A series of “overwhelming failures” have been discovered at a care home in Liverpool for the sixth inspection in a row. Finch Manor Nursing Home, which is located in Knotty Ash, was deemed inadequate yet again by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) due to understaffing and poorly managed medicines which put its residents at risk of “serious harm”. Inspectors were deeply concerned after diabetic residents were given insulin without checking whether it was safe to do so, and other residents were found to be running out of medications because the home had forgotten to order more. The CQC has since said it will be taking “additional action”. 

And good news for cyclists after a new low-cost bike hub opened in the city centre. Hype Urban Bikes on Sefton Street opened this week, and is selling refurbished bikes as well as group rides and bike hire schemes. The hub also plans to offer courses in bike repairs to train young people for jobs in the industry. Find out more about it here. 

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The rise and fall of the Baltic Triangle’s hapless scam artist

By Abi Whistance

I’m in a meeting room with Miles Pearson, the co-owner of 12 Jordan Street, a co-working space in the Baltic Triangle. He reached out to me about Fenir back in March, and has been keen to tell me all he knows about the elusive businessman.

The pair first came into contact in December 2023, when Fenir strolled through the doors of 12 Jordan Street. He said he needed a desk away from his other employees to run his business — a property company called Hu by Sabe Group Ltd — and wanted to move in “straight away”. “We never usually get walk-in enquiries. It was quite unusual,” Miles says, but explains he was happy for Fenir to take a desk after he’d provided a copy of his passport and the first month’s rent. 

Fenir soon settled in, and within a matter of days he’d begun offering lucrative business schemes to others in the co-work, as well as tenants in Miles’ other buildings. Fenir had a whole host of investment opportunities and commercial property rentals available, he said, and would happily be the middleman to broker any deals. One of those investment opportunities was a Georgian office building on Castle Street. On his Instagram, he posted photos of a gorgeous furnished building with white podiums and a view of a park, advertising it at £950 a month. Yet Miles wasn’t so sure — since when did Castle Street have a park? “He showed me a floor plan, and I’m an architect, so I know what a Georgian building looks like — it’s not that,” Miles laughs. When he reverse image searched the advert online, it appeared as an office building in London, not in Liverpool. “That’s when we knew something was off.”

Fenir Saba. Photo: Facebook

Nevertheless, Miles continued to let him use the co-work. “He was quite young. We thought maybe he was trying to impress people there,” he says. As first impressions go, this was understandable. Decked out in designer gear and never without a big flashy watch wrapped around his wrist, Fenir clearly has no problem showing off his status. When I meet him, he tells me he was bullied as a child for his weight, and in adulthood decided to hit the gym and get tattoos to feel better about himself. Perhaps that’s why Fenir also told people in 12 Jordan Street that he was a millionaire, a former police officer, a DJ, an ex-nightclub bouncer and that he ran a security company on the side. At the time, his various careers caused some amusement to those in the office. He was thought to be pretty harmless, in all. That was until his business schemes ramped up.