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Rediff.com  » Getahead » How the 'sure shot stock market investment tips' SCAM works!
This article was first published 10 years ago

How the 'sure shot stock market investment tips' SCAM works!

November 22, 2013 10:52 IST


Photographs: Uttam Ghosh/Rediff.com Ramalingam K

Your greed and the desire to make quick money make these frauds successful

We provide 'sure shot stock market investment tips'. Enjoy our free trial for 6 months. If you are satisfied, you can enrol for the premium investment tips package anytime.

Have you received an email or an SMS soliciting your attention thus? Have you wondered how could anyone provide ‘sure shot tips’? If these people know a sure shot investment tip, why would they reveal it to you, instead of investing and making money themselves?

Let me reveal their trade secret. But before I begin promise that you will NEVER fall for such scams.

The scamsters’ strategy!

Scamsters, usually, pose as online stock market advisers. They somehow collect 100,000 phone contact details of people to start with. Once these scamsters have these retail investors’ email ID or phone number, their scam activities begin.

How it works

The method is simple. They give tips. Say in a particular month they will predict the market will go up or go down. Accordingly, their 100,000 clients will react and invest according to these tips. It so happens that there is a 50:50 probability that the market will behave according to the tip. Either it will go down or go up.

Hence these scamsters will inform half of their clients (say 50,000 clients) that the market will go up and the remaining half (another 50,000 clients) will be informed that the market will go down.

The author is Ramalingam K, an MBA (Finance) and Certified Financial Planner. He is the director and chief financial planner of Holistic Investment Planners (www.holisticinvestment.in) a firm that offers Financial Planning and Wealth Management. He can be reached at ramalingam@holisticinvestment.in.

How the 'sure shot stock market investment tips' SCAM works!


Photographs: Uttam Ghosh/Rediff.com Ramalingam K

Developing satisfied clients

As the markets go either up or down, one group of 50,000 clients benefit.  The scamsters then focus on these satisfied clients and start offering tips for the next month. They will divide the remaining 50000 clients in two groups: To one group they will inform that the market will move up and they will ask the remaining 25,000 clients to bet on the stock market going down. Again one group of 25,000 clients benefit from the tip.

Developing very satisfied clients

These scamsters will then ignore the group who did not benefit but will now focus on the group 25,000 clients who benefitted. They will repeat the strategy by dividing them in two groups of 12,500 each and give them two opposite tips for the next month.

One group 12,500 clients benefit and the other 12,500 do not. The scamsters will now focus on the benefitted group of 12,500.

They will further divide this group of 12,500 very satisfied clients in two groups of 6,250 each and offer them two opposite tips. One group of 6,250 further benefit and the scamsters focus on themwill concentrate ignoring the other group.

Developing devoted clients

They will again divide this group of very satisfied clients of 6,250 into two groups of 3,125 each and repeat their strategy of giving two opposite tips for the next month. Again one group of 3,125 benefit and become very satisfied clients.

The scamsters will divide these very satisfied 3,125 clients in two groups and give them opposite tips. Out of the 3,125 very satisfied clients, 1,562 clients benefit and become devoted clients of these scamsters.

Tags: SCAM

How the 'sure shot stock market investment tips' SCAM works!


Photographs: Uttam Ghosh/Rediff.com Ramalingam K

Making merry out of these devoted clients!

What has happened in this process is that there are now 1,562 clients who have got 6 consecutive right tips from the scamsters and have made money in the process. They will be now greedier to earn more money. The scamsters are actually waiting for this opportunity. They will introduce the paid version of the so-called ‘sure shot investment tips’ package to these 1,562 devoted clients and sell the paid version to all of them for a lump sum amount. These devoted clients will continue to stick with these scamsters till they have lost considerable amount of money.

The scamsters then collect another 100,000 contacts and repeat the same scam again with these new contacts. Once their contact database gets exhausted, they create another investment tip website with a different brand name and start giving the trial package to people in the new database.

This is how the sure shot investment tips scams are devised. Scamsters simply build trust and then take advantage of the greed of their clients, who they have systematically engineered to become devoted so that they can part with money. These scamsters make hay!

Greed and the desire to make quick money are actually the weaknesses on which these scams are engineered. Don’t fall prey to these traps. Remove those weaknesses and become stronger financially forever.

If you want to avoid these kind of financial and investment traps and be on the right financial track, then preparing an elaborate financial plan will be of great help.

Tags: SCAM