COURT rooms could become clogged with friends and neighbours suing each other as the fall-out from the Titan business club begins to hit people in the pocket.

The warning has come from Lancashire Trading Standards officers after the controversial money-making scheme was declared illegal by the Court of Appeal.

They hope the ruling will prevent local people being roped into Titan clones and copycat schemes which they insist are doomed to failure.

Titan, managed by SHV Senator of Hamburg, Germany, has been labelled a scam in Parliament and was first exposed by the Lancashire Evening Telegraph in March.

Hundreds of people from East Lancashire were among the thousands of recruits across the country.

Members were asked to pay £2,500, latterly increased to £3,000, and told they could recoup their cash and more by recruiting new members. Legal experts representing Titan appealed after it was declared an illegal lottery in the High Court in June and banned from recruiting.

But, in delivering judgement yesterday, Lord Woolf said the majority of members were doomed to lose their investment as they pursued "glittering prizes".

Chief Trading Standards Officer Jim Potts said: "There is a danger that people who have been unable to get their money back will take legal action against the friends and colleagues who introduced them to the scheme."

Mr Potts said people could either write their losses off to experience or, if they felt they had been given false information, take legal action under the Misrepresentation Act 1967.

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