Questionable Investments and scams

I have now starting to write the book on Questionable Investments and Scams. Here is the introduction to my book.

Introduction

During the past few years, many investors had sought my assistance.

They have been the victims of investment scams or had lost money on questionable investments. Often, they were misled into making these investments.

They made the investments on the assurance of people they thought could be trusted, including the marketing officer of the bank that they had a relationship for many years.

In some cases, the financial products were risky, but the risks were not disclosed to them.

In other cases, the terms of the financial products were quite unfair to the consumers, i.e. they did not get a fair return for the risks underlying the products.

In good times, the return is mediocre. In bad times, they had to take a big loss on their capital.

Often, the marketing officers were themselves ignorant of the underlying risks of the financial products. They were trained to tell the good points about the product and had to meet high sales quota. In the eagerness to close the sale, they might have innocently misrepresented the products or given assurances that were not warranted.

Outside of the regulated financial institutions, other people sell unregulated products that bordered on being outright scams.

My experienceI came to know about these questionable investments and outright scams by listening to the experiences of investors who had fallen victims to these products.They sought my help on the steps that could be taken to recover their losses. In most cases, nothing can be done, as they are deemed to have invested “with their eyes open” and had to take the consequences of their decisions.Although it had been time consuming to listen to their sad tales, and to search for possible solutions, it has been an enlightening journey for me.

I get to know about how these scams work, or how bad financial products could be created by so-called reputable financial institutions to take advantage of naive consumers.

I wish to share some of these stories and to draw some lessons for consumers. I hope that they can help to educate consumers to avoid these bad products.

Tan Kin Lian