The big news in Hollywod is a D-List actor named Zach Avery (legal name Zachary Horowitz) who is set to plead guilty to a Ponzi scheme in which he collected $650 million from about 250 investors. That’s a lot of money! And that’s an impressive scam. Over the years, I’ve …
Yesterday I read a horrifying local story about Edward Matthes, a former financial advisor for Mutual of Omaha who stole at least $2.6 million from his clients. According to the Information in the federal case, Matthes carried on his fraud between 2013 and 2019. SIX YEARS!!!! He swindled at least …
How do you know if you’re considering investing in a Ponzi scheme? The promoters will never come out and tell you they are running a pyramid scheme, so the investors have to be smart enough to recognize them on their own. The good news is it is easy to spot …
Have you seen these invitations to “join an investment club” on social media? They’re frauds. They’re scams. They’re not investment clubs. This is a typical pyramid scheme (also called Ponzi scheme). Below is the scam being promoted by an attorney in Washington D.C. who has a pretty decent social media …
In this one minute video, Tracy explains how Ponzi schemes work. They are also called pyramid schemes because the constant recruitment of new “investors” creates the shape of a pyramid, with many new investors required at the bottom of the pyramid to pay “returns” to the earlier investors. The hallmarks …
There is no shortage of allegations of investment fraud since the stock market tanked in 2008. Are there more investment scams occurring, or have market conditions just led to the discovery of more of these schemes? I’ll guess the latter, although no one really knows for sure. The beauty of …
Despite the proliferation of information available about phony investment schemes and the dire warnings given regularly by news reporters, consumers continue to become victims of these scams on a regular basis. The perpetrators of investment schemes dream up stories explaining their unusually high rates of return on money, and people …
Last week the FBI posted an article on its site, A Pyramid of Lies, that told the story of the Gentry Ponzi scheme in rural Tennessee. Ponzi schemes are pretty easy to spot if you know the red flags. Even if you don’t know FOR SURE that an investment “opportunity” …
This week we heard news of $20 million (hidden in a box spring) being seized by the federal agents in its ongoing investigation of TelexFree, a multi-level marketing company that the government says was a massive Ponzi scheme. You can read all about the TelexFree case on Patrick Pretty’s blog. …
Investors are nearly $2.4 million poorer and Janamjot Singh Sodhi has earned himself an almost 5 year stay at Club Fed, thanks to a Ponzi scheme carried out through a company called Elite Financial Inc. The fraudster also used the names Jimmy Singh or Jimmy Sodhi. The scheme ran from …
