Adam, Eve and the APPLE of doom

Sometiimes I must make up some stuff to get a nice flashy headline. Well, to be honest, the story I'm about to tell does neither involve Eve nor Adam. It does however involve some innocence being lost.

A few days ago, a good friend of mine was contacted by an "Investment trading firm" calling themselves SMG Capital, a "Tokyo based" telephone trading company. He was offered to buy Apple Inc. shares at an impressively low price. By the way: Does anyone here believe that recommending "Apple Inc." for an investment is a smart, insider kind of hint? Even my grandma knows about Steve Jobs' latest achievements. Still he got a professional looking "research" (HAH!) leaflet describing SMG Capital as well as Apple Inc..

Doesn't all that look good? Very good? Too good perhaps? Let me put this extremely straight: Yes, it does in fact look too good to be true. SGM Capital is nothing but a bunch of fraudsters repeating the same plan over and over again. So far my friends and me have come up with at least these other fraudulent "companies" (neither of which exist).

• Okuma Group
• Dai Ichi Securities
• Sakura Financial Group
• Delta Continental 
• Satori Group

It's exactly the same thing I have already written about regarding  Delta Continental. All of these fake companies share some specific similarities:

• The agents call with no or fake caller ID
• The company has a web site giving very little or no information about the companies legal status (like registration numbers)
• The only internet evidence about the company can be found in dubious "free press" sites like prlog.com, openPR and the like.
• They always start with a renowned paper at an attractive price, faking high gains (of a stock you don't actually own!) within short time.
• Money always has to be transferred via very dubious clearing agents like "Serluna Ltd", "Dragon link Solutions", "Jubilant Holdings" and so on. This is done to keep them from being tracked down following the money trail.
• They then talk you into buying an unknown but even more profitable paper, with a substantial additional payment
• Then this last step is repeated until the "client/victim" runs out of money or patience.

Doing so, the fraudsters can  gain any amount between 5.000 and more than 200.000€ per victim. Please do not give a single cent to these assholes. They are fraudsters!

There is an old saying which about sums all that up: "If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck".

Still in doubt? Do you really think I could write all that without being sued to hell and back if these were real, legally operating companies?