I Nearly lost my money on this, last week.

byThoriso

468 followers

7 years ago

I never like to endorse a failing enterprise as much as the next guy, but an outright scam is frankly unacceptable.

Nothing irks me more than a sleazy no good con artist who takes the easy way out to cheat people out of their hard-earned money.

Unfortunately, my lawyer says because I avoided losing money to this guy I cannot name and shame him.

But I can tell you about the warning signs that made me suspicious.

The first warning was the claims that I can deposit $250 in a trading account and a software will trade Bitcoin and I will make good money.

Secondly, a woman called me immediately from a Gauteng number after submitting my signup to “Welcome” me and to ask if I traded before and if I was familiar with Bitcoin.

I said yes on both counts.

She said she would help me sign up, which I never asked for (Big red flag). She also passed my over to her male supervisor who I could make out in the background. (Another Big red flag because Supervisors are always busy and hardly that available on weekends!)

Being passed to a supervisor is a cheap trick to invoke authority even when it is not deserved. I made a mental note to NOT “assign” authority to him. (Keeps you from being led down a rabbit hole).

He had an authoritative voice and a thick East European accent (Big red flag for me because I expect South Africans to have a South African accent and to be more tentative initially.)

My alarm bells started going Ballistic and while I had them on the phone I typed their website domain plus scam and review into search and I was shocked at what I found.

This wasn’t a case of one troll or one dissatisfied customer. It was a stream of angry people who were not angry because they didn’t make money but they were angry at losing contact with these jokers after depositing money into the trading account.

He told me he was here to help me...(help I didn’t ask for) to sign up to another 3rd party payment processor (no Paypal link is my ultimate warning sign) so that he can help me transfer to the company that will do the trading.

??? Yes, now I am as confused as ever.

I had received the call so quickly they actually interrupted me as I was about to deposit the $250. I literally was filling in the credit card details and they helped me pause and look deeper.

I noticed that their domain had a dash in the name which means that someone has the other name so I removed the dash and saw where it took me, it was another version of the company but was asking $250 to trade forex!

(Trading forex with only $250 is a losing game because you have to take unacceptable risks to make any money of significance.) I never traded forex but I did trade call and put warrants on the Johannesburg stock exchange and I lost because I needed to ride the wins for as long as possible to break even.

Back to the professional trading platform website. They didn’t even bother to change the logo.

I thought these 2 people on the phone with me must be middlemen and maybe the trading company is legitimate. But one of the complaints stood out more than the others.

The customer said clearly that the trading company did not answer his calls to withdraw money after trading (as they promise all the time) and the website stopped working after some weeks. (I am so puzzled and this supervisor is still on the line helping me open another account.)

I noticed that they accepted only Visa credit card and debit cards so I said I only have a Master card and then he set off my biggest alarm bell, he asked if I know how to go to remote desktop assistance.

I said Sorry, I am canceling the deal and no longer interested. Hung up and blocked the phone number on my cell phone.

Now you may be asking if I am an Anesthesiologist who has a thriving private practice and an affiliate on Wealthy Affiliate and making money why would I risk $250 on something that may or may not work.

Because I am always looking for opportunities for my list and me losing $250 or $1000 on a bogus program is worth it if I can protect one person from being taken for $1000 they cannot afford to lose.

Besides the $250 will be made back and I will still have my integrity.

“With great power comes great responsibility.” Ben Parker (Spiderman)

I hope this experience teaches at least one person how to fish out bad programs and how to trust their instincts and intuition.

If you had a similar experience please lay it out in the comments so that others can learn from your experience as well.

Please, no judgment or hurting other people because we all learn by making mistakes.

If you haven’t made a mistake, good for you but I would wager your mistake is still coming.????