Recently I had the honour of being completely fooled by an overseas group of scam artists based in the UK. It cost me a lot of money. So here is Part 2 in case anyone comes across it.

1/ Dan Thompson makes several attempts to phone  and finally gets on to me.After telling me all about himself and his family and his success in trading…this chap is very genuine! Dan explains how it is better to hedge the trade and to take an ‘put option’ which is a trade that pays when the price of Unleaded petrol goes down. Explained it on a graph we draw up over the phone and advises you need to have 3 regular options that the price will increase to  a certain point to one put option that it will go down past a certain point. I can see the sense in that. The bottom line to that is that I increase my investment….just to be safe.

2/ After 3 weeks I check the trades daily on the regular official sites and the price of unleaded petrol after being steady starts falling so much so that I am making a good profit from my ‘Put Option’. Dan was right to give that advice.

3/ Dan rings again from London and says some people in the know from South America are coming tomorrow andalways have good information. He phones again a couple of days later…sure enough there is a copper mine in Chile….the worlds largest mine supplying a large percentage of the worlds copper….there is industrial unrest and a big strike is certain in the next couple of weeks. The price of copper is set to skyrocket due to a shortage in supply. This is certain to happen. So I take the companys minimum of 3 Options.

4/ The Unleaded price is still going down and a nice profit increases while the Copper price does go up very nicely also but no strike after 3 weeks. Anyway I am very happy with my position.

5/ Dan Thompson phones again very excitedly that there has been a very unusual happening. One of their clients in Crimea has not been able to pay for the gold options he took up 3 weeks ago. This was due to the European Union putting an embargo on Crimean Credit due to Russias involvement there. In those 3 weeks his options are now worth 5 times as much! The company has decided to sell the options to its clients and by law they must be sold at the original price!! So the company will let me sell all my options at a profit of $2500 and put that $10000 into these gold options. The only condition was that I had to put in an additional $10,000…company policy. If I did  that I would have an instantaneous windfall of $51,000!!

6/ This was the first time I was offered something that was too good to be true. All the rest seemed reasonable and above board.

7/ That night I decided to look in depth at the 3 websites they had set up and discovered they were fraudulent!! I had blown my money with a very clever con. Those guys worked so diligently to gain my trust I am sure if they put that much effort into legitimate endeavours they would do much better.

8/ The lesson learnt….I take my hat off to them….if I was a wealthy person I would say it was well worth the experience!!

Checking a Website to see if it is a Fraud

There have always been fraudsters around who gain our trust in order to deceive and relieve us of our pay.
The thing we should keep in mind that these people practice their act so much that it becomes a work of art. The fraudsters are usually more 3 believable than the honest seller! They get to practice every aspect of their trade…fine tuning it to perfection.
Here are some tips…you will find many more on the Internet from experts.
1. Don’t think if you put the Business name up and write Scam after it that it will necessarily come up. For a start they change business names frequently and website names and another most victims don’t report the scam when they have been conned. You still google ‘…….scam’ but that’s the first step. Often the business will write itself up here as if a recommendation from a third party.
2. Don’t think if its not on the ACCC website or other DODO s that it’s safe.
3. It is possible to copy a legit website …change a few things and use it as your own.
4. Fraudsters have to change their website names frequently as they get discovered.
5. This is how I finally figured that the gents at Scope Cash Management were frauds….too late of course but it did save me $10,000.
They referred to 3 websites. Their own ScopeCM,  UK Government Futures Trading Securities Commission.. FTSC UK. and the independant holding organisation Imperial Trade Management
I went to a domain company called ‘whois’ and there you can look up all URLs (domain names) You can look up when registered, where registered and who registered it.
In this case Scope CM a supposedly British Company was registered in Crimea, The UK Government website was registered in San Francisco and the independent body Imperial Trading was registered somewhere overseas as well. They were all registered by the same person in January 2016!
6. Googling their address at 100 Fenchurch st London showed this was a building site up for demolition two years back!