6 Foreigners Arrested In Online Investment Scam

[HardenedSoul]

whatever you think, Nigeria's reputation precedes it. Tis the home of scam. Sorry but true

They didn't bring down the global financial system though, did they ? No, that accolade goes to the US, the UK and Europe. Just cos their scams were conducted by guys in $2000 suits doesn't make 'em any more honorable.

[les Dennis]

Any news on the 6 arrested? Have they been charged, deported, released or still in custody?

[moskito]

someone here received messages like these ?

Goodday,

I want to make a reservation for two adults(couple) starting from 01/11/2008 - 14/11/2008.However,a Certified Bank Cheque of 7,550 EURO will be sent to you,that will cover your rental services and you should keep the remaining money which will be used by the couple for their daily welfare on their arrival.So,confirm this and provide me with the followings:(1)The total costof the reservation for the 14 days starting from 01/11/2008 - 14/11/2008

(2) YOUR FULL NAME (name for cheque of 7,550 EUROS )

(3)ADDRESS (for cheque delivery)..............

(4) PHONE NUMBERS.for payment to be delivered to you.Please remember that this business requires prompt response.I also hope there stay will be made comfortable.The clients name are below for the paper work JET and SUSAN GARRY12 London Rd . .Ashford. Middx. TW15 3AAUK

Thanks.

Robert Ashkew

no clue what they want with the data

[George4]

.....they had deceived the investors to invest over Bt100 million in fake firms...

Anyone who invests in a company without checking that it exists, deserves to be parted from their money.

Nobody deserves to be purposely cheated...<snip>

My money is on the a Filipino woman and a French man, I am sure there are no Britons involve in this..............The French are clever people at times........hahahah ( but very RARE)

Deportation to Buriram Bt5million x 6 = Bt30million...tax Bt20million..hel_l they got 50% profit

[TAWP]

The largest percentage of scam perpetrators online are Nigerians. They have been busted again and again in the U.S. but since the U.S. has pretty much open borders they come back again and again if kicked out of the country.

While Nigerians are over-represented in a very niche scam they are by no means any majority nor are they located in the US.

So take your immigration- and open border-rant and shove it.

[Sparkles]

Any news on the 6 arrested? Have they been charged, deported, released or still in custody?

Still waiting. So many of these stories sem to die.I dont buy the Nation and havnt done since they dropped the FALANG page many years ago, anyone remember that ? compuslory reading but probably far too close to the bone,politically. Was back in Thaksins time not that I am saying he had anything to do with its removal ????

[pedro01]

Sure there's news but nothing worth repeating to the rabid mob here...

[Arkady]

This sounds like a boiler room selling shares that don't exist, most likely to people in Australia, the UK or the US.

A lot of people reading this post seem to think the local IFA's whom call to arrange meetings with their consultants are in the same game.

It is totally different.

They are in a different box but there are some similarities. All are unlicensed in Thailand working in contravention of The SEC Act and know little or nothing about the investment business. Most, if not all of their firms are also unlicensed in the UK, despite frequent claims to the contrary. All are heavily motivated by commission and care little about what happens to you or your investment. The products they sell are generally of poor quality but they are selected for their willingness to pay high up front commissions to third party vendors.

Some of them are even selling their own fly by night BVI type fund management products to marks representing them as being managed by reputable UK based companies, without disclosing the conflict of interests. Most clients will have difficulty withdrawing money from these schemes early or at all. Some have been threatened with violence, defamation suits and deportation when they complained about miserably performing investments and tried to get their money back from IFA outfits in Bangkok that look respectable at first glance. It is much better to steer clear of them and do your research on investments on the Internet. They are able to take advantage of the extreme ignorance of most non-financial people about finance and investment, even their own knowledge is also extremely limited. Most people will spend more time on the Internet researching the purchase of new DVD player than they will research what to do with their live time savings and retirement fund. That is my personal opinion but if you see value in a service that recommends investments from a limited universe of high commission payers that hack off a minimum of 6% before they have done anything for you, plus layers of annual fees, continue. Just think how much better they have to perform than low fee funds in order to recover those fees and these funds are not managed by blue chip firms that can attract the brightest and the best fund managers.

Edited September 23, 2009 by Arkady

[jackh]

another con-artist foreigner in Bangkok scamming money! What about this place attracts them? This website announced a recent case right here, again in our own backyard: www.accelon-asia.com

They are probably attracted to Thailand because they know that expats dumb enough to live in LOS will fall for such scams.

[splatman]

Does anyone know the names of these brits? Or have a link to picture from thai news?

I am concerned for a friend of mine who i am unable to contact

[Arkady]

another con-artist foreigner in Bangkok scamming money! What about this place attracts them? This website announced a recent case right here, again in our own backyard: www.accelon-asia.com

They are probably attracted to Thailand because they know that expats dumb enough to live in LOS will fall for such scams.

It seems that Spain is also attractive to these type of scumbags for many of the same reasons that they flock to Thailand. See report below.

Oxbridge-Sounding Phone Scammers in Spain Seduce U.K. Investors

By Caroline Binham and Ben Sills

Oct. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Credit controller Linda Reay was sorting the daily pile of bills back in 2005 at the bed- manufacturing factory where she worked near Carlisle, an industrial city in northwestern England. Then she took a phone call that would destroy her retirement dreams.

The smooth-talking caller identified himself as a London stockbroker named Robert Samuel. Nearing retirement from her 17,000-pound-a-year job, Reay took the salesman’s advice to invest in the stock market. Within six months, her family had sent more than 13,000 pounds ($20,570) to a St. Lucia-based company named Damak Group to invest in ValiRx Plc, which Samuel said was developing cancer-fighting therapies. Although ValiRx is a real London-based drugmaker, the investment pitch was pure fiction and Reay would never see her money again.

“I thought you could make a little bit from what you’ve got,” says Reay, now 61 and retired. “You see that share prices can go up in a few days and you make money, so I thought maybe it could happen to me. It sounded aboveboard.”

Robert Samuel was a false name, just one of a group of cocaine-fueled, self-styled “telesales terrorists” reading from a script 960 miles (1,545 kilometers) away in Barcelona. It was there that Damak preyed on investors with a series of share- selling scams known as boiler rooms.

Reay is among 450 victims ripped off in the space of six months by Damak’s cold-callers. A two-year police investigation culminated in four people being sent to jail in April, and police officers are still on the hunt for the 2.4 million pounds stolen from investors and funneled through accounts in Hong Kong, St. Lucia and Spain.

Cold Callers

That’s just a fraction of the 300 million pounds that police estimate boiler rooms will steal from U.K. investors this year compared with 100 million pounds in 2007. They say cold- calling share sellers are finding it easier to lure victims as people look for quicker returns in the wake of the financial crisis.

Spain is the friendliest locale for boiler rooms that target U.K. investors, investigators say. Its major cities are only a two-hour flight from London, and the country is home to 761,000 expatriate Britons, according to the U.K. Foreign Office, making it an ideal place to set up a stock-selling operation aimed at English speakers. About one-third of all known boiler rooms are located in Spain, according to data from the U.K. Financial Services Authority.

That’s why British tabloid newspapers refer to the 1,000- mile stretch of Mediterranean coastline -- which runs from Barcelona in the northeast to the resort of Marbella in the south -- as the “Costa del Crime.”

Criminal Haven

Spain’s beach communities gained notoriety as a safe haven for British criminals in the early 1980s, when convicted robber Ronnie Knight spent a decade there on the run. A century-old extradition agreement between the U.K. and Spain lapsed in 1978 amid tensions over the status of Gibraltar, the self-governing British territory that Spain claims as its own. While the agreement was re-established in 1985 just before Spain joined the European Community, the predecessor to the European Union, the country didn’t shake off its image as a gangster refuge.

“What do boiler rooms want?” asks Michael Levi, a professor of criminology at the University of Cardiff in Wales, who has written books on corporate crime. “They want a nice environment, and that means good telecoms and a local poclie and judiciary that aren’t too bothered about them. That has been true for Spain.”

Edited October 14, 2009 by Arkady

[mrtoad]

another con-artist foreigner in Bangkok scamming money! What about this place attracts them? This website announced a recent case right here, again in our own backyard: www.accelon-asia.com

They are probably attracted to Thailand because they know that expats dumb enough to live in LOS will fall for such scams.

Just to rephrase -it is not the local expats here that are being targeted, these boiler rooms are targeting people in the UK, Australia etc

[caf]

.....they had deceived the investors to invest over Bt100 million in fake firms...

Anyone who invests in a company without checking that it exists, deserves to be parted from their money.

Nobody deserves to be purposely cheated...<snip>

Of course. Thaivisa is here to help inform foreigners not to make light relief of their problems.

Humour is fine in its place. This is not the thread or the place. IMHO, mods

[princejohnjay]

Yes, am a Nigerian and am proud we have trainned the world in the scam business industry and they are making it big and progressing in it. You the Americans, UK's, Europe, what have you done to the world? Nothing but giving us world economic crisis. Bull_sh!t

[TAWP]

How about...was successful, without having to resort to scams, so you guys had something to steal?

[slapout]

Yes, am a Nigerian and am proud we have trainned the world in the scam business industry and they are making it big and progressing in it. You the Americans, UK's, Europe, what have you done to the world? Nothing but giving us world economic crisis. Bull_sh!t

We introduced the KKK, ni.... shooters, segregated school in North America, several terms of endearment you may not have heard, soul food, rap music, and just a host more (convenient Or not) items and habits depending on your favorite color.

[Thai at Heart]

I'm sure they are able to buy numbers from directory-services regarding companies with foreign, partly or full, ownership.

Seems that was how they found us.

Chamber of Commerce meetings. Never drop your business card in the bowl.

[TAWP]

An update of info, a few months after I wrote my post a friend that does some marketing for some foreign bars etc in BKK told me that she had managed to lift a database (I assumed with help as she isn't very technical) from a bank a friend of hers worked at to get listings of customers that are wealthy. Then she sold this data to wine-importer that wanted to offer subscriptions of their bottles to well off people...

Just one of those things...

[Sabre]

another con-artist foreigner in Bangkok scamming money! What about this place attracts them? This website announced a recent case right here, again in our own backyard: www.accelon-asia.com

Never trust a website with a hyphenated address.

[Kilgore Trout]

.....they had deceived the investors to invest over Bt100 million in fake firms...

Anyone who invests in a company without checking that it exists, deserves to be parted from their money.

Bit harsh, sometimes people make poor rash decisions without first checking the facts, but hardly deserving of being scammed from their hard earned money

Agreed, I met a guy at the chip shop by cowboy years ago when the telemarketing scam thing was big business in BKK, this guy was pretty drunk and began to tell me how they were bilking money from poor old Australian widows and such. This incredible slimebag said the same thing as the other poster; "if they are that daft then they deserve to lose their money." My thinking was if you ever did that to my grandmother you would end in a similar way as Pesci's character in Goodfellas. These people are true scum, worse because they do their dirty business on the phone or computer and never even look their victims in the eye.

I wonder if the people working were in on it or actually thought they were in a legit business?

[patjem]

Name of the company please?

As some investment-firms have recently been calling my office a lot and asking to come and give consultation-meetings which I have always declined...

Yeah, we had a few cold-callers over the past few months, one colleage of mine enjoys stinging them along a bit but I can't be bothered by it...... generally, I consider anyone contacting me in that way is likely to be desperate to try to take some of my money.

" Sir, I have my investments all in the UK right now, and I very much doubt that you are going to interest me in anything worth my while accepting a very poor exchange rate at the moment to re-invest elsewhere in something I know little about versus what i am quite confident about.... goodbye and please don't call again."