Scams Not Again....Another Gold Scam…
Every Sunday On this Newspaper, there will be an article on the papers that features a successful investor in a Q&A format. Part of the Q&A will be a question on their worst and best investment. Normally, the best investment would be business of the interviewee. However, it was different today. The best investment is an unfamiliar name. What piqued my interest was that the interviewee said that that particular investment was earning her a return of US$90 a day from a capital of US$6,000 (that’s 1.5% a day) ! What legitimate investment would give a fix daily return? So, I put on my Sherlock Holmes cap and started to do some investigation…
It is Time the news editors do his or her due diligence when writing someone in the newspapers of being a successful in life and being used by someone to help them push up their public profile and they became a pray for the innocent victims in the public who read it !
It was not easy to find the website of the firm on Google. I found it using Yahoo. The website looks does not look professional and was filled with pictures of the gold mining process. Basically, the company claims to be harvesting residual gold and precious metals from tailings, the unwanted earth and rocks from the initial mining process. They do the harvesting from mines in Africa. Nothing is mentioned about the way the investors’ return is calculated.
So again, I searched for the CEO’s details. There was no match on the companies he worked for. One company came close but wasn’t a perfect match. The other asset management company did not even exist. Neither was the CEO’s details on the web.
There were some Facebook pages but they were in Malay. I don’t understand Malay. But I came across a photo of the screen capture of an investors ‘investment plan’. The daily dividend is at 1% every day! What kind of investment can give you a guaranteed 1% return every day?! I think you know the answer…
This is not the first time coming across readings of ‘successful’ investors putting money into suspicious investments. Other articles from the weekly column has also mentioned of investors ‘investing’ into popular gold cash back schemes. A colleague shared that his client has put significant amount into one such popular schemes and refuses to listen to him. That client was sold after receiving the ‘cash backs’.
When national papers put up such articles, non-discerning investors would gain confidence on such scams and more people would become victims. However, it is not easy to expose scams in Singapore at all. It is common that only after thousands of people have lost millions of dollars that some form of action might be taken. Sadly, many victims have to resort to civil suits whereby the quality of the engaged lawyer can make or break the legal claim. Not many investors, who are your man-in-the-street and having lost a significant part of their wealth, can afford top-notched legal advice.
