Martin Kong3
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Boiler Room Scams
- Thread starter Airthrey Capital
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Yes read that brilliant
rsh01
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Why does it take this long for justice? Why is it the victims responsibility to sort out? Good skills to the guy, and perhaps it can set a precedent, but these sort of violations of privacy shld be sorted sooner, this sh1t has been going on for years.
Exactly.
I watched that programme about phone marketing abuse and firms ignoring the tps restricted numbers register and the regulator was asked how much abuse there was and they said they had thousands of complaints a month when pushed to say how many firms had been fined for consistent abuse they admitted not a single firm had been fined!
This is my first post on this website although I registered a little while ago when I suspected that the investment I had made with Charles Pearson Investments International might not be kosher. They have recently been the subject of an FSA alert and all my hopes of seeing my investment again have gone now that their New York phone number and website have gone down. Quite simply my life is in ruins as they have taken all my money (a very, very considerable sum). My payments were made to the same account as previously posted on this forum by other contributors in relation to Amazon Gold Ventures and Solamon Energy shares.I do not wish to say too much on here but if anyone has any information about this 'gang' (who all sounded English to me, despite their supposed New York location) I would appreciate their responding and hereafter perhaps opening a direct line of communication as I feel I must at least try to track them down.
Has anyone checked or is able to check whether their 'Floor 23, Suite 1996, Equitable Building, 120 Broadway, Manhattan, New York, 10271' address is true?
Can anyone tell me if the location of their 0019177200142 New York phone number can be traced some way, even if it is diverted elsewhere?
Has anyone checked or is able to check whether their 'Floor 23, Suite 1996, Equitable Building, 120 Broadway, Manhattan, New York, 10271' address is true?
Can anyone tell me if the location of their 0019177200142 New York phone number can be traced some way, even if it is diverted elsewhere?
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Does anyone have any information regarding Michael Shumak, John Kim, Guardian Securities Ltd, White Crystal Management, Transnational Securites, Trust SA, or Mitchell/Morgan Finch International?
This guy is going to be caught and I would really appreciate any help.
Thanks in advance.
This guy is going to be caught and I would really appreciate any help.
Thanks in advance.
The address exists but it will just be a virtual office, they wont be there, or anywhere near there. They will be in some third world dump where they can pay off the police. I can find no trace of that number, though the code indicates its most likely a New York mobile phone number.
Of course the relevant authorities may be able to find out more. Have you reported this?
Sophia Tls
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Hi people. I'm also a victim of these scams many years ago !!! Thank god I only send a small ammount (according to what I read here). 9 years now I get calls 2-3 times a year from people that say me that I own some company's shares (which I am not aware of course) and a buyer is interesting to buy them for an ammount that always is 160K$ and more (so tempting!!!). When I say "of course I will sell if you want them" after 2-3 calls and after they have send me some supposedly legal papers to sign, they always started telling you "unforunatelly...your shares are not able to be sold publicly, because of the restrictive legend and I need to deduct it by paying ............etc"!!!! Same story all these years. They are so into their acting role that when I say them I cannot pay it, I don't have money they reply me by sending me also some supposedly legal papers to sign that I give up my right to these shares!!!! Unbelievable people!!!! The last company called named "Summit private equity LLP" the person who called me named : John Blaze. All papers signed by someone called David Klein!!! Here is the trap!!! There is a legal company by name "summit partners" with a real person "David Klein" (they steel his intendity). By searching their website created on August 2012 hosted by Moldova server. I track John blazes' email and it is in Netherlands!!! I have so many information about them, but it doesn't matter cause noone does anything about that!!! Or am I wrong? Can I send information somewhere that will help other people from these "empty" human beings???
kenmar 1952
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Linsure Holdings, World wide Financial
Haven't been here for a while as the scams do not change. However decided to follow this one. I was phoned, then e mailed, by Susan Richmond in May claiming that a scammer named Mr Cox had died and his estate had been seized to repay his Linsure victims and my name had appeared on the list. Their lawyer, Mr. Peter VanDerHoon, then phoned to explain the deal and then Mr Grant Marshall e mailed a proxy form to give them authority to deal on my behalf. The story was that the money was in Latvia and I would need to pay a retainer for the lawyers. A variation on the advance fee scam. Unfortunately I have deleted the mail with the fees attached. Told them where to go.
Lo & behold another call last week from David Jansen of World Wide Financial, Banhofstrasse 98, Floor 5, Zurich, 8001, Switzerland.. This time they have a client who has been ripped off in Linsure stock and is now trying to buy up said stock and then claim a tax rebate on the drop in value. He offered £2.50 a share and I have 50000!! 1.5% commission to them for the deal, fair enough, but then there is the matter of 10%, £12.500, to be deposited in Escrow in the Phillipines. They sent me proof that the buyer had deposited his £125,000. He claimed there was no risk on my part as the UK banks were insured, although they do not tell you this, so if I was scammed my bank would refund the money! Try that on your bank manager. Yes they are insured but only against their errors, not the clients. And they can only recall the money if the recipient agrees! I took the time to check and its all in the standard conditions we are all issued with but do not read. Anyway the documents were contersigned by the same Grant Marshall. CEO no less.I let David Jansen stew for a day or 2, then took his call this afternoon. After the initial pleasantries I told him I would not be going ahead as it was an advance fee scam. I then had literally 5mins of him ranting down the phone, my wife even took the phone for a listen, and I could not get a word in. I was going to offer him £10000 if he would come and meet me so we could do the deal face to face, but he was not listening. I got bored eventually and hung up, thereby depriving myself of the pleasure of telling him where to stick his phone. But I do have the vision of him having a fit in his office. If there ever was any doubt that this was a scam he certainly cleared that up!
Anyone else heard from them?
Haven't been here for a while as the scams do not change. However decided to follow this one. I was phoned, then e mailed, by Susan Richmond in May claiming that a scammer named Mr Cox had died and his estate had been seized to repay his Linsure victims and my name had appeared on the list. Their lawyer, Mr. Peter VanDerHoon, then phoned to explain the deal and then Mr Grant Marshall e mailed a proxy form to give them authority to deal on my behalf. The story was that the money was in Latvia and I would need to pay a retainer for the lawyers. A variation on the advance fee scam. Unfortunately I have deleted the mail with the fees attached. Told them where to go.
Lo & behold another call last week from David Jansen of World Wide Financial, Banhofstrasse 98, Floor 5, Zurich, 8001, Switzerland.. This time they have a client who has been ripped off in Linsure stock and is now trying to buy up said stock and then claim a tax rebate on the drop in value. He offered £2.50 a share and I have 50000!! 1.5% commission to them for the deal, fair enough, but then there is the matter of 10%, £12.500, to be deposited in Escrow in the Phillipines. They sent me proof that the buyer had deposited his £125,000. He claimed there was no risk on my part as the UK banks were insured, although they do not tell you this, so if I was scammed my bank would refund the money! Try that on your bank manager. Yes they are insured but only against their errors, not the clients. And they can only recall the money if the recipient agrees! I took the time to check and its all in the standard conditions we are all issued with but do not read. Anyway the documents were contersigned by the same Grant Marshall. CEO no less.I let David Jansen stew for a day or 2, then took his call this afternoon. After the initial pleasantries I told him I would not be going ahead as it was an advance fee scam. I then had literally 5mins of him ranting down the phone, my wife even took the phone for a listen, and I could not get a word in. I was going to offer him £10000 if he would come and meet me so we could do the deal face to face, but he was not listening. I got bored eventually and hung up, thereby depriving myself of the pleasure of telling him where to stick his phone. But I do have the vision of him having a fit in his office. If there ever was any doubt that this was a scam he certainly cleared that up!
Anyone else heard from them?
Re: Linsure Holdings, World wide Financial
:clap::clap: nice one.
I used to have a little game with them where I would try and get THEM to hang up on me without being rude or telling them I had no funds was great fun :cheesy:
:clap::clap: nice one.
I used to have a little game with them where I would try and get THEM to hang up on me without being rude or telling them I had no funds was great fun :cheesy:
I can see that there is alot of passion here, let try to channel this against these criminals. I have asked a lot of questions on different blogs sites and have managed to freeze several accounts, I have also sent copies of a standard Mareva letters to those thant want it. The weakness of these scammers is the bank accounts, if everone would publish they accounts they have paid in to we could move quickly to freeze them. I and two other persons with me are also taking "other" actions.. I cannot tell you at this stage what they are as it may compromise these actions. If anyone wants join our small group, please write a private message to me via this website.[/QUOTE]
Hi, you wrote you've been able to freeze accounts and shared standard Mareva letters... would you please be able to share one with me that can be sent to several banks around the world - which were part of a boiler room scam on me? I tried doing a TT reversal from the bank, but as expected, the funds request reversals were all declined.
Oh and should the Marevas be physically sent to banks fraud departments, or legal dept' or where exactly?
Thank you
Alex.
hi, did you get any answers to this post on west pier?
Anybody that calls you selling investments is a scammer, every single one of them, don't fall for it.
The procedures depend on which country you are living in. In the UK you should report it to the Financial Services Authority and the City of London Police Operation Archway. As regards getting your money back you will be extremely lucky to ever see a penny of it again. I have heard some people saying they managed to get the bank to do something if the transaction was very recent but I've never seen any proof of that. In short your money is most likely gone for good.
Additionally you will now be subjected to ongoing follow scams where they will try to get more money from you under the pretence of recovering you initial losses. Needless to say this will only lead to further losses.
whistler_man
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Just a couple of notes. These guys are all over craigslist Bangkok. Look in Jobs/sales.
Just for fun, email this asshole and tell him you have leads for him.
His ad: WANTED P2/SLOP LEADS
I AM SICK AND TIRED OF PEOPLE WHO ADVERTISE LEADS FOR SALE HERE AND NEVER REPLY TO THEIR ADDS. I AM LOOKING FOR FOR GOOD P2/SLOP LEADS, IF YOU HAVE SUCH DATA I WILL MAKE IT WORTH YOUR WHILE. PLEASE CONTACT ME AT [email protected]
If you get a reply, do a email trace to find his location. I think: IP-TRACE.com or something. Don't have it in front of me at the moment. Have fun!!
Another one: 50-points for your Hot Clients (Bangkok)
50/50 deal. Bring in your Phase One clients, only, no slop clients.
If you have existing hot paying clients on your limb, then write to me.
You provide - -
** your voice
** your current load cards
** your existing relationship with your paying clients
I will provide - - Our registered and verifiable equities, options, and investment funds, which run on my managed trading platform, with my back-end, 24/7 Admin, dividends, phones, and banking - - all of which you will use to load, swap, cool, churn, service, and re-Load your existing paying clients.
I want to find one successful sales pro who can do this from now through Friday, 14-December. (We will shut-down for 3-weeks on Friday, 14-December) If you're skilled, and if you bring in payments, I will ask you re-join us when we start back up on Monday, 07-January.
Still yet another: U.K and Aussie Qualified Leads For Sale (any)
U.K and Aussie Qualified Leads For Sale. Approx. 1,000 of each. Info. includes name, tel numbers, email add, inv. experience, liquidity, bttc and qualifier's call notes. Looking for a quick cash sale of 5,000 baht for the lot.
AO looking for work (thailand)
Are you sick of people not picking up the phone? Draw whores running your call rates with no chance of a DEAL.
well, I do 150 to 200 calls a day, the phone is never outta my hand, i work hard and start early and stay late, if necessary...obviously if its your room. I can work from home, TQ'ing , fronts, 3 call fronts, opening, driving ...the works...
What I don't want.....some smart **** when it comes to commissions, pay what ya own, when ya owe it....and yes....I get commissions, cause I work. It may be a new concept to a lot of your guys...
10,000 a week for first 4 weeks, ya ain't got a deal by then, get outta the business
These scumbags have no shame. It's well known that Thai authorities look the other way when it comes to Boiler room ops in thai.
Also check out: Boiler Rooms - Boiler fraud reporting - stock alert and investor alert | Boiler Rooms
Current list of companies calling.
THIS IS AN INTERESTING SITE. ANYTIME HE CAN HE EXPOSES THESE GUYS. ANDREW DRUMMOND IN THAILAND.
http://www.andrew-drummond.com/2012/07/drugs-sex-rape-loadsamoney-boiler-rooms.html
Cheers!
Just for fun, email this asshole and tell him you have leads for him.
His ad: WANTED P2/SLOP LEADS
I AM SICK AND TIRED OF PEOPLE WHO ADVERTISE LEADS FOR SALE HERE AND NEVER REPLY TO THEIR ADDS. I AM LOOKING FOR FOR GOOD P2/SLOP LEADS, IF YOU HAVE SUCH DATA I WILL MAKE IT WORTH YOUR WHILE. PLEASE CONTACT ME AT [email protected]
If you get a reply, do a email trace to find his location. I think: IP-TRACE.com or something. Don't have it in front of me at the moment. Have fun!!
Another one: 50-points for your Hot Clients (Bangkok)
50/50 deal. Bring in your Phase One clients, only, no slop clients.
If you have existing hot paying clients on your limb, then write to me.
You provide - -
** your voice
** your current load cards
** your existing relationship with your paying clients
I will provide - - Our registered and verifiable equities, options, and investment funds, which run on my managed trading platform, with my back-end, 24/7 Admin, dividends, phones, and banking - - all of which you will use to load, swap, cool, churn, service, and re-Load your existing paying clients.
I want to find one successful sales pro who can do this from now through Friday, 14-December. (We will shut-down for 3-weeks on Friday, 14-December) If you're skilled, and if you bring in payments, I will ask you re-join us when we start back up on Monday, 07-January.
Still yet another: U.K and Aussie Qualified Leads For Sale (any)
U.K and Aussie Qualified Leads For Sale. Approx. 1,000 of each. Info. includes name, tel numbers, email add, inv. experience, liquidity, bttc and qualifier's call notes. Looking for a quick cash sale of 5,000 baht for the lot.
AO looking for work (thailand)
Are you sick of people not picking up the phone? Draw whores running your call rates with no chance of a DEAL.
well, I do 150 to 200 calls a day, the phone is never outta my hand, i work hard and start early and stay late, if necessary...obviously if its your room. I can work from home, TQ'ing , fronts, 3 call fronts, opening, driving ...the works...
What I don't want.....some smart **** when it comes to commissions, pay what ya own, when ya owe it....and yes....I get commissions, cause I work. It may be a new concept to a lot of your guys...
10,000 a week for first 4 weeks, ya ain't got a deal by then, get outta the business
These scumbags have no shame. It's well known that Thai authorities look the other way when it comes to Boiler room ops in thai.
Also check out: Boiler Rooms - Boiler fraud reporting - stock alert and investor alert | Boiler Rooms
Current list of companies calling.
THIS IS AN INTERESTING SITE. ANYTIME HE CAN HE EXPOSES THESE GUYS. ANDREW DRUMMOND IN THAILAND.
http://www.andrew-drummond.com/2012/07/drugs-sex-rape-loadsamoney-boiler-rooms.html
Cheers!
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whistler_man
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CONFESSIONS OF A CON ARTIST
A veteran scammer reveals how he made millions ripping off unsuspecting investors—and how you can protect yourself from people like him
AS TOLD TO DOUG SHADEL
My name is Jim, and I have spent most of my adult life swindling people out of money—big money. I worked in 30 fraudulent business operations over a 10-year period, pitching everything from gold coins to time-shares to oil and gas leases and other business opportunities. These scams took in millions of dollars. No matter how much money we made or how far-fetched the deal was, I never got caught. That is, until September 30, 2004.
That was the day 40 U.S. postal inspectors and FBI agents with gold badges and guns burst into my office. This was on Biscayne Boulevard in Miami. We occupied two full floors of a nondescript commercial office building. The place housed numerous other scam boiler rooms I had worked in, but you would never have known that from the outside. “Hang up the phones—it’s over!” one agent yelled.
The particular scam here was an Internet-kiosk business opportunity. We’d been running TV ads claiming that investors could make thousands of dollars from computer kiosks placed in high-traffic areas like airports and shopping malls. For a small fee, passersby could use these kiosks to check their email or surf the Web. Back in the early 2000s this was a hot idea. We told people they could earn a minimum of $30,000 to $35,000 per machine each year. This was pure baloney—the machines didn’t generate anything close to that kind of income. And we sold them at huge markups. We took in $17 million from 700 unwary investors in about eight months. At least 100 employees were in the building at the time of the raid, including secretaries and other clerical staff. A lot of them didn’t even know that the business was a fraud.
The agents gathered everyone in a big open area we called The Pit—where, moments earlier, dozens of salesmen had been pitching prospective victims over the phone—and started calling out people’s names. They were handed letters explaining whether they were targets of the investigation, material witnesses or something else. When they called my name, things got quiet. I was the manager of the room; people wanted to see how I would react. As I walked over to retrieve my letter, my cellphone went off. The theme from The Godfather (my new ring-tone) filled the room. People couldn’t help but laugh.
The next thing I knew, a postal inspector took me into a side room and told me, “Your day just got ****ty, and it is going to get ****tier.”
That was the end of my last scam. The Feds sent a dozen guys to prison. I did 37 months, and it probably should have been longer.
You might be thinking, “Oh, those get-rich-quick scams are obvious, and I would never fall for one.” When I hear people say that only stupid someone fall for fraud, I feel like asking for that person’s phone number. But here’s the thing: I didn’t want to talk to stupid people, because stupid people don’t have $50,000 lying around to give me. You would be amazed at how many doctors, lawyers, engineers and college professors I ripped off. The bottom line is, fraud is a crime that can happen to anyone, given the right con man and a victim with the right set of circumstances.
Make no mistake: I am a dangerous person on the telephone. If I choose to be fraudulent in my practices, nothing is going to stop me from taking lots of money from you. Period, the end. And the world is filled with people just as dangerous as I am.
“You and I are going to make a lot of money together. ”
The author today, four years after leaving prison. His career as a scam artist over, he lives with his parents and owes the federal government almost $1 million in restitution.
I was what’s known as a closer: the guy who gets you to hand over the money. I’ll tell you how, so you can recognize and avoid the techniques I used. I can do this because I am out of the game now. If I were still in the game, I’d tell you only one thing: “You and I are going to make a lot of money together.”
BORN TO CON
I learned how to do this at an early age. I’ve got a natural ability to talk people into things. Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s, people called me Fonzie; they would say, “Hey, Fonzie, that mouth of yours is gonna make you a million dollars someday.”
In my neighborhood, 500 families lived on my street, giving me a lot of parents to manipulate. You learned what works. I played the heartstrings; I intimidated; I made people feel bad for me. Whether it was manipulating my three older sisters or convincing the neighbor lady that I needed one more ice-cream bar from the Mister Softee truck, I always knew what to say. And as I got older, I got better.
In 1995, I got a chance to apply these gifts of persuasion in the workplace. I went to work for a Florida company that sold prepaid-calling-card vending machines. At first I thought it was a real job. But it seemed like a lot of customers were calling back to complain. In fact, they all called back to complain. Believe it or not, for a long time I thought every business was like this. Gradually, it dawned on me that this was the dark side of corporate America. But by then I had developed my own dark side—drug addiction.
I first tried heroin when I was 22, and became instantly addicted. For the next 15 years I would move in and out of rehab centers and in and out of fraud boiler rooms. Drug addiction gave me the two characteristics all scam operators want in a closer: selfishness and greed. If you are strung out and in need of a fix, you will do anything to feed your habit.
This may explain why the owners of many of these scam operations in South Florida recruited their boiler room staff at local Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Who’s a better talker than an addict? Nobody. Who is more manipulative than an addict? Nobody. Who is more desperate for money than an addict? Nobody. Addicts hustle; that’s what we do.
So you couple that with my experience selling over the phone in Florida and you have the perfect storm. I’m a hustler from New York and an addict. These boiler rooms were dying to hire me.
DEVELOPING THE PERSONA
This was lesson number one: Assume a false personality or social mask that makes it easier to pull off the deception. Swindling is really acting, and you play a character who will help you appear legitimate, confident and successful … even when you are not.
I’ve trained hundreds of salesmen who worked in scam boiler rooms. And I always told them to picture themselves with the big sprawling office, sitting behind the mahogany desk, with the family portrait on the credenza. Your autographed football and jerseys are hanging on the wall, along with awards and several pictures of you posing with famous actors. The pool table is across the room on the left-hand side. You are this bigwig whom everybody wants to talk to. The idea is to build up confidence, so that when you ask for the money you won’t show one lick of fear or hesitation or doubt that this isn’t, hands down, absolutely the greatest decision this client is making for his or her family and future.
The persona explains how a barrel of dented-can drug addicts can persuade successful businesspeople to write big checks without reading the paperwork. On the outside you will see nothing but charm, an engaging personality and swagger. On the inside lies a predator. There is no conscience in this business. It’s every man for himself, and the goal is to acquire as much money as possible.
The business needs to have a persona, too, to look legitimate and trustworthy. So we’d run television commercials and hire famous actors to appear in them. In that Internet-kiosk scam we hired Adam West of the 1960s TV show
Batman, The first day we ran that ad, it generated more than 10,000 phone calls.
I saw this tactic used again and again in my scam career—getting celebrities to legitimize the operation. I guess people see an Adam West or an Ernest Borgnine (we also hired him) on TV and assume the product he’s selling is the real deal or he wouldn’t be selling it. But the celebrity’s contract frequently states that he or she cannot be held responsible for the accuracy of the claims in the script. The celebrity probably doesn’t know that people are getting ripped off; he may know nothing at all about the business. He just comes in, reads his part and leaves.
IT’S ABOUT EMOTION, NOT LOGIC
Think about the first time you fell in love or a time when someone cut you off on the freeway and you were seething for hours. Were you thinking clearly? Probably not. Those who believe they’d never fall for a scam don’t realize it’s not about how smart you are; it’s about how well you control your emotions. Fraud victims are people with emotional needs, just like the rest of us. But they can’t separate out those needs when they make financial decisions. That’s what makes them vulnerable.
As a master closer, I made it my first objective to get the victim “under the ether.” Ether is that fuzzy state when your emotions are stirred up and you’re so agitated that you won’t know which way is up and which is down. Once I have gotten you into this condition, it doesn’t matter how smart or dumb you are. Ether trumps intelligence every time.
The two most powerful ways to do this are through need and greed.
To find a client’s emotional need, I’ll ask a bunch of personal questions. Then I’ll throttle up the pressure by focusing on that need. “Oh, you lost your job? That’s got to be tough.” Or “So your two kids are in college and the tuition is driving you into the poorhouse.” Now the person isn’t thinking about whether the offer is a scam but instead, “Here’s a fix for my problems.”
The “crush,” or the “kill”—that’s what we call closing the deal—is emotionally driven. It’s not logic. If you apply logic, the answer is: “No, I am not going to send you my hard-earned money. I don’t even know who you are.” If my victims had applied logic to our deals, they would have walked away every time.
The other pathway to the ether is simple greed: I just promise people they can make a ton of money.
The Perfect Victim
I’m often asked how I could have ripped off senior citizens. The answer is that con men target people who have money, and a lot of seniors are sitting on fat nest eggs. It’s the Willie Sutton rule: He robbed banks because that is where the money was.
But there’s more to it than that. I think older people are easier to scam, because their emotional needs are closer to the surface. They aren’t afraid to tell people how much they care about their kids and grandkids. They aren’t afraid to share their fears about the unstable financial markets and how much they worry about being on a fixed income. These fears are real. And every one of them is a bullet for my gun.
My scam career was focused on investments like phony oil and gas deals, bogus business opportunities and gold-coin scams. And for these types of investments the perfect victim was almost always a male. Why men? Men are more emotional than women. Men are grandiose; they are full of ego. And that’s all driven by emotion; it’s driven by insecurity; it’s driven by a feeling of inferiority.
One of my victims was a successful engineer from California named Tim. He first talked to one of our salesmen, who gave him the generic pitch. Then he turned him over to me to close. The first thing I said to Tim was: “Hi, Tim, this is Jim. How are you doing? Go get a pen and paper right now—I want you to write my name down.” Tim immediately said, “Oh, okay, I’ll be right back.”
Bang. With those six words I knew that Tim was going to fall and fall hard. It wasn’t just that he immediately complied with my request; it was how he complied. The tone of his voice was high-pitched and squeaky, almost submissive. It’s hard to explain, but over time you pick up the nuances and subtleties in people’s voices. It’s the wolf sensing the lamb. He was signaling that I was in control and that he wanted me in control.
I think older people are easier to scam, because their emotional needs are closer to the surface. They aren’t afraid to share their fears.
Most people who get emotional quickly will fall every time. And if they don’t get worked up, I won’t waste my time with them. If prospects are asking a lot of questions or tell me they want to think it over or talk with their lawyer, I will hang up the phone. Victims don’t ask a lot of questions; they answer a lot of questions. Victims don’t read paperwork; they wait for you to tell them what it says. Victims don’t look for why the offer is a scam; they look for why the offer will make them money. They want you to make them feel good so they can pull the trigger.
Early on in my career I was selling bogus oil and gas units to investors. We were selling units for $22,500 for a quarter unit, or $90,000 for a full unit, promising a 10-to-1 return. Sure, we had a well, but it was a dry hole, and we knew it—there was no chance of hitting oil. Every so often when I was pitching these deals, an investor would ask if I was registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. I would always say, “Of course we are, and I want you to verify that the minute we get off the phone.” The truth is, we were never registered, but 98 percent of the people who ask that question never check. They just want to hear me say it.
Scams to Watch Out for
If I were still in the scam business, I would focus on reverse mortgages and precious metals. Home-equity and reverse mortgage scams are attractive now because a lot of seniors have paid off their house, and that’s like an untapped bank account. If your home is worth $300,000 and you paid off your mortgage a couple of years ago, you have $300,000 sitting in the bank, waiting for me to steal it. A lot of TV and direct mail advertising tells you how to get money out of your house while you are still living in it. Some of these ads are legitimate; many are not.
My ma asked me once how her friends could avoid these scams. I told her two things. If someone is pitching a deal, ask yourself, “What’s in it for him?” A common ploy is to get you to take out a loan on your house, then invest the proceeds in a long-term annuity or some other investment in which they make a huge commission. It may not be a fraud, but it may be a lot better deal for the salesman than for you. I also told Ma that when it comes to your house, never sign any paperwork until your attorney—someone you choose, not someone the salesman refers you to—reads the fine print.
As for gold and silver scams, I worked in several coin rooms in the 2000s. We would sell gold coins at a 300 to 500 percent markup. So the victims would pay $25,000 for a bunch of coins, which they would receive, but years later, they would take them to a coin shop and learn they were worth only a few thousand dollars. This is a great scam, because the coin industry is largely unregulated. Plus, because the victims receive the coins, they don’t realize until years later that they’ve been taken. With the bad economy, these scams are huge now.
Out of the Game, for Good
All of those years I ripped people off, I knew it was wrong. But I was making so much money, I didn’t care. It wasn’t until those agents busted into my office in Miami that it finally hit me: What I was doing was really bad. I pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and went to prison for more than three years. I had a lot of time to think about my crimes. When I got out, I promised my mother I would never go back to my old ways. It wasn’t easy. The first year I was out of prison I was asked almost daily to work as a closer for the latest scam. Finally, I changed my phone number so I wouldn’t be tempted.
In 2009, I spoke at a Washington, D.C., fraud-prevention conference sponsored by the Federal Trade Commission. Since then, I’ve been working on the other side of the scam business: I shot a couple of television interviews and even did some role-playing with fraud fighters from the AARP Fraud Fighter Call Center.
Today I am 44 years old, and I live in my parents’ house. I owe the federal government almost a million dollars in restitution that I don’t have a prayer of paying back. Thanks to years of smoking and drug abuse, I have acute emphysema and I carry around an oxygen tank. I’m on the waiting list for a double lung transplant, but the clock is running out. Can you spell karma?
People sometimes ask me about remorse. I do understand that innocent people got hurt as a result of my actions. I think about my victims. I pray for my victims. And even though I have spent the past four years trying to help people avoid monsters like me, I wonder if it has been enough.
________________________________________
Jim ----- was convicted on charges of conspiracy to commit mail fraud in 2006. Doug Shadel, a former fraud investigator for Washington state’s Attorney General’s
Office, is the author of Outsmarting the Scam Artists: How to Protect Yourself From the Most Clever Cons (AARP/Wiley); he is also currently AARP’s Washington state director.
________________________________________
Don’t Get Burned…
1 Never make a buying decision when you’ve just heard the sales pitch. Always give yourself at least 24 hours to think about it. This gives you time for the emotional effects of the sales presentation to subside—and time for you to do research.
2 Don’t ever share personal information about your family or about your worries with people who are trying to sell you something.
3 In any interaction with someone trying to sell you a deal, always ask yourself,“What’s in it for them?”In other words, if this is such a great deal, why are they calling you about it? Why don’t they just do it themselves?
________________________________________
…But if You Do
FOR INVESTMENT FRAUD, file a complaint with your state securities regulator.
FOR INSURANCE SCAMS, file a complaint with your state insurance department.
FOR ALL OTHER INSTANCES of fraud, file a complaint with your state Attorney General’s Office.
A veteran scammer reveals how he made millions ripping off unsuspecting investors—and how you can protect yourself from people like him
AS TOLD TO DOUG SHADEL
My name is Jim, and I have spent most of my adult life swindling people out of money—big money. I worked in 30 fraudulent business operations over a 10-year period, pitching everything from gold coins to time-shares to oil and gas leases and other business opportunities. These scams took in millions of dollars. No matter how much money we made or how far-fetched the deal was, I never got caught. That is, until September 30, 2004.
That was the day 40 U.S. postal inspectors and FBI agents with gold badges and guns burst into my office. This was on Biscayne Boulevard in Miami. We occupied two full floors of a nondescript commercial office building. The place housed numerous other scam boiler rooms I had worked in, but you would never have known that from the outside. “Hang up the phones—it’s over!” one agent yelled.
The particular scam here was an Internet-kiosk business opportunity. We’d been running TV ads claiming that investors could make thousands of dollars from computer kiosks placed in high-traffic areas like airports and shopping malls. For a small fee, passersby could use these kiosks to check their email or surf the Web. Back in the early 2000s this was a hot idea. We told people they could earn a minimum of $30,000 to $35,000 per machine each year. This was pure baloney—the machines didn’t generate anything close to that kind of income. And we sold them at huge markups. We took in $17 million from 700 unwary investors in about eight months. At least 100 employees were in the building at the time of the raid, including secretaries and other clerical staff. A lot of them didn’t even know that the business was a fraud.
The agents gathered everyone in a big open area we called The Pit—where, moments earlier, dozens of salesmen had been pitching prospective victims over the phone—and started calling out people’s names. They were handed letters explaining whether they were targets of the investigation, material witnesses or something else. When they called my name, things got quiet. I was the manager of the room; people wanted to see how I would react. As I walked over to retrieve my letter, my cellphone went off. The theme from The Godfather (my new ring-tone) filled the room. People couldn’t help but laugh.
The next thing I knew, a postal inspector took me into a side room and told me, “Your day just got ****ty, and it is going to get ****tier.”
That was the end of my last scam. The Feds sent a dozen guys to prison. I did 37 months, and it probably should have been longer.
You might be thinking, “Oh, those get-rich-quick scams are obvious, and I would never fall for one.” When I hear people say that only stupid someone fall for fraud, I feel like asking for that person’s phone number. But here’s the thing: I didn’t want to talk to stupid people, because stupid people don’t have $50,000 lying around to give me. You would be amazed at how many doctors, lawyers, engineers and college professors I ripped off. The bottom line is, fraud is a crime that can happen to anyone, given the right con man and a victim with the right set of circumstances.
Make no mistake: I am a dangerous person on the telephone. If I choose to be fraudulent in my practices, nothing is going to stop me from taking lots of money from you. Period, the end. And the world is filled with people just as dangerous as I am.
“You and I are going to make a lot of money together. ”
The author today, four years after leaving prison. His career as a scam artist over, he lives with his parents and owes the federal government almost $1 million in restitution.
I was what’s known as a closer: the guy who gets you to hand over the money. I’ll tell you how, so you can recognize and avoid the techniques I used. I can do this because I am out of the game now. If I were still in the game, I’d tell you only one thing: “You and I are going to make a lot of money together.”
BORN TO CON
I learned how to do this at an early age. I’ve got a natural ability to talk people into things. Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s, people called me Fonzie; they would say, “Hey, Fonzie, that mouth of yours is gonna make you a million dollars someday.”
In my neighborhood, 500 families lived on my street, giving me a lot of parents to manipulate. You learned what works. I played the heartstrings; I intimidated; I made people feel bad for me. Whether it was manipulating my three older sisters or convincing the neighbor lady that I needed one more ice-cream bar from the Mister Softee truck, I always knew what to say. And as I got older, I got better.
In 1995, I got a chance to apply these gifts of persuasion in the workplace. I went to work for a Florida company that sold prepaid-calling-card vending machines. At first I thought it was a real job. But it seemed like a lot of customers were calling back to complain. In fact, they all called back to complain. Believe it or not, for a long time I thought every business was like this. Gradually, it dawned on me that this was the dark side of corporate America. But by then I had developed my own dark side—drug addiction.
I first tried heroin when I was 22, and became instantly addicted. For the next 15 years I would move in and out of rehab centers and in and out of fraud boiler rooms. Drug addiction gave me the two characteristics all scam operators want in a closer: selfishness and greed. If you are strung out and in need of a fix, you will do anything to feed your habit.
This may explain why the owners of many of these scam operations in South Florida recruited their boiler room staff at local Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Who’s a better talker than an addict? Nobody. Who is more manipulative than an addict? Nobody. Who is more desperate for money than an addict? Nobody. Addicts hustle; that’s what we do.
So you couple that with my experience selling over the phone in Florida and you have the perfect storm. I’m a hustler from New York and an addict. These boiler rooms were dying to hire me.
DEVELOPING THE PERSONA
This was lesson number one: Assume a false personality or social mask that makes it easier to pull off the deception. Swindling is really acting, and you play a character who will help you appear legitimate, confident and successful … even when you are not.
I’ve trained hundreds of salesmen who worked in scam boiler rooms. And I always told them to picture themselves with the big sprawling office, sitting behind the mahogany desk, with the family portrait on the credenza. Your autographed football and jerseys are hanging on the wall, along with awards and several pictures of you posing with famous actors. The pool table is across the room on the left-hand side. You are this bigwig whom everybody wants to talk to. The idea is to build up confidence, so that when you ask for the money you won’t show one lick of fear or hesitation or doubt that this isn’t, hands down, absolutely the greatest decision this client is making for his or her family and future.
The persona explains how a barrel of dented-can drug addicts can persuade successful businesspeople to write big checks without reading the paperwork. On the outside you will see nothing but charm, an engaging personality and swagger. On the inside lies a predator. There is no conscience in this business. It’s every man for himself, and the goal is to acquire as much money as possible.
The business needs to have a persona, too, to look legitimate and trustworthy. So we’d run television commercials and hire famous actors to appear in them. In that Internet-kiosk scam we hired Adam West of the 1960s TV show
Batman, The first day we ran that ad, it generated more than 10,000 phone calls.
I saw this tactic used again and again in my scam career—getting celebrities to legitimize the operation. I guess people see an Adam West or an Ernest Borgnine (we also hired him) on TV and assume the product he’s selling is the real deal or he wouldn’t be selling it. But the celebrity’s contract frequently states that he or she cannot be held responsible for the accuracy of the claims in the script. The celebrity probably doesn’t know that people are getting ripped off; he may know nothing at all about the business. He just comes in, reads his part and leaves.
IT’S ABOUT EMOTION, NOT LOGIC
Think about the first time you fell in love or a time when someone cut you off on the freeway and you were seething for hours. Were you thinking clearly? Probably not. Those who believe they’d never fall for a scam don’t realize it’s not about how smart you are; it’s about how well you control your emotions. Fraud victims are people with emotional needs, just like the rest of us. But they can’t separate out those needs when they make financial decisions. That’s what makes them vulnerable.
As a master closer, I made it my first objective to get the victim “under the ether.” Ether is that fuzzy state when your emotions are stirred up and you’re so agitated that you won’t know which way is up and which is down. Once I have gotten you into this condition, it doesn’t matter how smart or dumb you are. Ether trumps intelligence every time.
The two most powerful ways to do this are through need and greed.
To find a client’s emotional need, I’ll ask a bunch of personal questions. Then I’ll throttle up the pressure by focusing on that need. “Oh, you lost your job? That’s got to be tough.” Or “So your two kids are in college and the tuition is driving you into the poorhouse.” Now the person isn’t thinking about whether the offer is a scam but instead, “Here’s a fix for my problems.”
The “crush,” or the “kill”—that’s what we call closing the deal—is emotionally driven. It’s not logic. If you apply logic, the answer is: “No, I am not going to send you my hard-earned money. I don’t even know who you are.” If my victims had applied logic to our deals, they would have walked away every time.
The other pathway to the ether is simple greed: I just promise people they can make a ton of money.
The Perfect Victim
I’m often asked how I could have ripped off senior citizens. The answer is that con men target people who have money, and a lot of seniors are sitting on fat nest eggs. It’s the Willie Sutton rule: He robbed banks because that is where the money was.
But there’s more to it than that. I think older people are easier to scam, because their emotional needs are closer to the surface. They aren’t afraid to tell people how much they care about their kids and grandkids. They aren’t afraid to share their fears about the unstable financial markets and how much they worry about being on a fixed income. These fears are real. And every one of them is a bullet for my gun.
My scam career was focused on investments like phony oil and gas deals, bogus business opportunities and gold-coin scams. And for these types of investments the perfect victim was almost always a male. Why men? Men are more emotional than women. Men are grandiose; they are full of ego. And that’s all driven by emotion; it’s driven by insecurity; it’s driven by a feeling of inferiority.
One of my victims was a successful engineer from California named Tim. He first talked to one of our salesmen, who gave him the generic pitch. Then he turned him over to me to close. The first thing I said to Tim was: “Hi, Tim, this is Jim. How are you doing? Go get a pen and paper right now—I want you to write my name down.” Tim immediately said, “Oh, okay, I’ll be right back.”
Bang. With those six words I knew that Tim was going to fall and fall hard. It wasn’t just that he immediately complied with my request; it was how he complied. The tone of his voice was high-pitched and squeaky, almost submissive. It’s hard to explain, but over time you pick up the nuances and subtleties in people’s voices. It’s the wolf sensing the lamb. He was signaling that I was in control and that he wanted me in control.
I think older people are easier to scam, because their emotional needs are closer to the surface. They aren’t afraid to share their fears.
Most people who get emotional quickly will fall every time. And if they don’t get worked up, I won’t waste my time with them. If prospects are asking a lot of questions or tell me they want to think it over or talk with their lawyer, I will hang up the phone. Victims don’t ask a lot of questions; they answer a lot of questions. Victims don’t read paperwork; they wait for you to tell them what it says. Victims don’t look for why the offer is a scam; they look for why the offer will make them money. They want you to make them feel good so they can pull the trigger.
Early on in my career I was selling bogus oil and gas units to investors. We were selling units for $22,500 for a quarter unit, or $90,000 for a full unit, promising a 10-to-1 return. Sure, we had a well, but it was a dry hole, and we knew it—there was no chance of hitting oil. Every so often when I was pitching these deals, an investor would ask if I was registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. I would always say, “Of course we are, and I want you to verify that the minute we get off the phone.” The truth is, we were never registered, but 98 percent of the people who ask that question never check. They just want to hear me say it.
Scams to Watch Out for
If I were still in the scam business, I would focus on reverse mortgages and precious metals. Home-equity and reverse mortgage scams are attractive now because a lot of seniors have paid off their house, and that’s like an untapped bank account. If your home is worth $300,000 and you paid off your mortgage a couple of years ago, you have $300,000 sitting in the bank, waiting for me to steal it. A lot of TV and direct mail advertising tells you how to get money out of your house while you are still living in it. Some of these ads are legitimate; many are not.
My ma asked me once how her friends could avoid these scams. I told her two things. If someone is pitching a deal, ask yourself, “What’s in it for him?” A common ploy is to get you to take out a loan on your house, then invest the proceeds in a long-term annuity or some other investment in which they make a huge commission. It may not be a fraud, but it may be a lot better deal for the salesman than for you. I also told Ma that when it comes to your house, never sign any paperwork until your attorney—someone you choose, not someone the salesman refers you to—reads the fine print.
As for gold and silver scams, I worked in several coin rooms in the 2000s. We would sell gold coins at a 300 to 500 percent markup. So the victims would pay $25,000 for a bunch of coins, which they would receive, but years later, they would take them to a coin shop and learn they were worth only a few thousand dollars. This is a great scam, because the coin industry is largely unregulated. Plus, because the victims receive the coins, they don’t realize until years later that they’ve been taken. With the bad economy, these scams are huge now.
Out of the Game, for Good
All of those years I ripped people off, I knew it was wrong. But I was making so much money, I didn’t care. It wasn’t until those agents busted into my office in Miami that it finally hit me: What I was doing was really bad. I pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and went to prison for more than three years. I had a lot of time to think about my crimes. When I got out, I promised my mother I would never go back to my old ways. It wasn’t easy. The first year I was out of prison I was asked almost daily to work as a closer for the latest scam. Finally, I changed my phone number so I wouldn’t be tempted.
In 2009, I spoke at a Washington, D.C., fraud-prevention conference sponsored by the Federal Trade Commission. Since then, I’ve been working on the other side of the scam business: I shot a couple of television interviews and even did some role-playing with fraud fighters from the AARP Fraud Fighter Call Center.
Today I am 44 years old, and I live in my parents’ house. I owe the federal government almost a million dollars in restitution that I don’t have a prayer of paying back. Thanks to years of smoking and drug abuse, I have acute emphysema and I carry around an oxygen tank. I’m on the waiting list for a double lung transplant, but the clock is running out. Can you spell karma?
People sometimes ask me about remorse. I do understand that innocent people got hurt as a result of my actions. I think about my victims. I pray for my victims. And even though I have spent the past four years trying to help people avoid monsters like me, I wonder if it has been enough.
________________________________________
Jim ----- was convicted on charges of conspiracy to commit mail fraud in 2006. Doug Shadel, a former fraud investigator for Washington state’s Attorney General’s
Office, is the author of Outsmarting the Scam Artists: How to Protect Yourself From the Most Clever Cons (AARP/Wiley); he is also currently AARP’s Washington state director.
________________________________________
Don’t Get Burned…
1 Never make a buying decision when you’ve just heard the sales pitch. Always give yourself at least 24 hours to think about it. This gives you time for the emotional effects of the sales presentation to subside—and time for you to do research.
2 Don’t ever share personal information about your family or about your worries with people who are trying to sell you something.
3 In any interaction with someone trying to sell you a deal, always ask yourself,“What’s in it for them?”In other words, if this is such a great deal, why are they calling you about it? Why don’t they just do it themselves?
________________________________________
…But if You Do
FOR INVESTMENT FRAUD, file a complaint with your state securities regulator.
FOR INSURANCE SCAMS, file a complaint with your state insurance department.
FOR ALL OTHER INSTANCES of fraud, file a complaint with your state Attorney General’s Office.
I have noticed that these boiler room scammers are spamming the internet boards and blogs with worthless articles to cover up any negative information about them.
What they do is use their company name in the headline and post articles which use the word "boiler", "scam", "fraud",etc. in an innocent way to distract the search engines.
Negative information is cleaned up. Probiably with some leagal threats towards the board owner.
They are also quite active here with this rubbish.
What they do is use their company name in the headline and post articles which use the word "boiler", "scam", "fraud",etc. in an innocent way to distract the search engines.
Negative information is cleaned up. Probiably with some leagal threats towards the board owner.
They are also quite active here with this rubbish.
whistler_man
Active member
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- 3
kuno80, You are a moron.
Maybe you should look at some of my other posts. I feel the info I dig up may help some of you gullible people. Obviously you have fallen for their scam and even sent money to them while awaiting that call from your trusty "Portfolio Manager" to sell your worthless shares in "The best thing since sliced bread". The above article you call worthless has info about what drives people to believe the pitch and send money. I pass on relevant info that I hope will help someone.
My message is, and always will be - DO NOT FALL FOR THE PITCH AND DO NOT SEND MONEY TO THESE SCUM. Bottom line is you will NEVER get money back and there is nothing you can do about them.
Oh!! I just realized another reason for your sudden interest in this forum. Maybe you are one of those "brokers" and your deals are kicking as a result of the info on this and other sites and are facing 3 weeks of shutdown with no money. You are most likely a "draw whore" {one who takes the 8 - 10k Baht a week and never writes a deal that pays.} Makes for a lonely holiday season in BKK/KL/Jakarta/Manila etc with no money to party.
Just goes to show that this forum is getting the word out about scumbags from Liverpool, east end, Birmingham. . . who are having a hard time scamming the masses.
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