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A Fin24 user has learnt hard lessons when he decided to invest in an offshore company, which did high-frequency trading on a Wall Street portfolio.
The money had to be invested for a fixed six month term and at least 50% had to be reinvested afterwards.
The company sent out weekly statements showing the weekly income, capital balance and a sliding-scale fee deducted weekly as well. He writes:
After doing some research and learning some lessons, I see that these schemes tend to have a number of things in common, which should ring alarm bells:
- Their managing members are not easy to identify, or they use false names for this purpose;
- They operate referral systems that get clients to herd in more clients and get paid for it. There is nothing wrong with this, but if a product is so good, it should sell itself;
- They cannot answer critical questions regarding your concerns about their business;
- There is a long waiting time to get funds paid out of your account with them;
- There are huge penalties for withdrawing prematurely from their portfolios.
In my case the company had everything in place. This included security of payments and banking, weekly statements sent to me, addresses of places of business, but in the end everything was just a very elaborate lie.
They were moving funds out of accounts to shell companies, instead of investing funds in financial trading strategies (high frequency trading).
Eventually they would have defaulted on payments.
Underhanded activity
I still find it hard to believe that in this day and age, people still get away with this kind of underhanded activity without anyone realising what’s really going on.
I blame the government institutions for not doing enough to clamp down on these predators before they actually do harm.
Usually lawyers get involved, taking years to sift through the facts.
In the meantime they run up huge bills, which they deduct from any recovered funds for their own gain. The investors are always the losers.
There are numerous websites that also warn people what to be cautious about when getting involved.
- Fin24
Ever been scammed? Share your experience and you could get published.
* Disclaimer: All articles and letters published on MyFin24 have been independently written by members of the Fin24 community. The views of users published on Fin24 are therefore their own and do not necessarily represent those of Fin24.
The money had to be invested for a fixed six month term and at least 50% had to be reinvested afterwards.
The company sent out weekly statements showing the weekly income, capital balance and a sliding-scale fee deducted weekly as well. He writes:
After doing some research and learning some lessons, I see that these schemes tend to have a number of things in common, which should ring alarm bells:
- Their managing members are not easy to identify, or they use false names for this purpose;
- They operate referral systems that get clients to herd in more clients and get paid for it. There is nothing wrong with this, but if a product is so good, it should sell itself;
- They cannot answer critical questions regarding your concerns about their business;
- There is a long waiting time to get funds paid out of your account with them;
- There are huge penalties for withdrawing prematurely from their portfolios.
In my case the company had everything in place. This included security of payments and banking, weekly statements sent to me, addresses of places of business, but in the end everything was just a very elaborate lie.
They were moving funds out of accounts to shell companies, instead of investing funds in financial trading strategies (high frequency trading).
Eventually they would have defaulted on payments.
Underhanded activity
I still find it hard to believe that in this day and age, people still get away with this kind of underhanded activity without anyone realising what’s really going on.
I blame the government institutions for not doing enough to clamp down on these predators before they actually do harm.
Usually lawyers get involved, taking years to sift through the facts.
In the meantime they run up huge bills, which they deduct from any recovered funds for their own gain. The investors are always the losers.
There are numerous websites that also warn people what to be cautious about when getting involved.
- Fin24
Ever been scammed? Share your experience and you could get published.
* Disclaimer: All articles and letters published on MyFin24 have been independently written by members of the Fin24 community. The views of users published on Fin24 are therefore their own and do not necessarily represent those of Fin24.
