Just received this letter from a business acquisition company claiming to be a co-op. Have looked them up on companies house and it appears to be a standard company with 1 shareholder, one director and one PSC. Is it worth replying with a warning that ‘co-operative’ is a sensitive term in English business law, or should it just be ignored? 
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I assume you don’t want to sell you your business? If not just respond with:
- I checked on companies house and you are not a co-operative.
- You may have referred to yourself as a co-operative without realising it is a “Sensitive” word Annex A: Sensitive words and expressions that require prior approval to use in a company or business name - GOV.UK
- I would suggest you don’t do so again or you run the risk of being taken to court for passing off as a business you are not.
I used to send those sorts of emails all the time at Co-operatives UK and 9/10 it was becuase they just thought co-op sounded ethical and didn’t realise…
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When I read this text, it sounded a bit lacking in depth. So I checked it with two GPT detectors and they put the probability of being generated by a neural network at 60-70%.
So the sender’s intention is probably just to send generic letters, and the mention of co-operatives may also be a GPT inserted term.
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We get loads (probably one a week) of these company acquisition emails/letters at Unicorn, as far as I can tell they’re entirely auto-generated from information scraped from companies house/the FCA or some other directory we’re in.
Occasionally they’ll sprinkle some keywords like ‘co-operative’ (or ‘organic’ in our case) to make it seem more authentic, like Yuliy suggests that might be done via ChatGPT or the like.
I just ignore them as I assume there’s unlikely to be a human on the other end who is actually responsive to anything I might say, and like email spam, replying will just indicate there is someone there to contact further and further paint a target on ourselves.
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Well you learn something new everyday! Capitalism is so shameless…