Are you too ashamed to say you’ve been swindled? I’m not.
Once a friend brought a dodgy furniture restorer round to my flat for drinks. A fellow who made himself agreeable and tut-tutted about my dining room chairs. Kindly, he took two away to restore, actually he wanted to take them all. I never saw him or the chairs again. Funnily enough the unpleasant chap who painted the outside of the house in 2019 wanted me to have the glass-fronted bookcase in the kitchen restored by his friend. I expect his friend would have asked for a deposit so I would have paid to have my furniture stolen. Other scams have been paying up-front for building and decorating, the job never completed. Actually a friend paid £30,000 to a builder for a job that wasn’t even started.
Recently I got junk e mails inviting me to learn how to make money trading oil. As I spent thirty-nine years dealing in oil and don’t know, I was interested. A couple of clever chaps have built a trading system similar to the Man black box; think algorithms. They pitched to Dragon’s Den and there was a fight to fund them. While the show was being filmed a dragon made money. Now, it seems elderly folk are investing and letting the trading system do the work. Log in every few minutes and see how much money you have made. The entry level is low, only £250, and a broker will guide you through the investment process. By the way the scammers are too lazy to change $250 on their website and if it’s an automated trading system, claimed to be AI, why speak to a broker? Silly me, there will be encouragement to “invest” more.
Because this investment links itself to Dragon’s Den and seems to have their approval it seems worth a punt? No it doesn’t, but if you are elderly, slightly stupid and a bit short of money it is an attractive proposition. I gave it serious consideration. The pitch is most convincing so I’m not providing a link. But I don’t want to discourage you. Nine traders made $660 million trading oil futures in Essex in one day in April last year – nice money.