Believe it or not, Mr. he has been having a bit of fun with a korea based boiler room called Carlton global management, which got my phone no off somewhere and who have been calling pushing some worthless penny share onto me.
Oh well, Mr. he has a past as a financial analyst, so I have been enjoying the sales and their “analyst” more or less admitting that pushing shares with questionable fundamentals over the phone based on bogus insider information is not legal in most localities, moreover, having their “analyst” putting a “buy” on it and at the same time admitting that he had no figures or reliable forecasts was also rather funny.
However, if any of you get called up by any outfits like this one, BEWARE.
If you invest in anything employing high pressure sales tactics, you need to leave investing to someone else.
Man, these guys are so amateur. If they really want to do it well, they should spam market the stocks after buying say a 1% stake in some old oil explorer.
Even better, they claimed that the company was into oil exploration- that said the only thing I came over was that the company was into Co2 sinks, which is a pretty dead tech in the US as they are not signatories to Kyoto.
also, I still love the fact that they hve no figures on the stock, and that they admit it.
I got ripped off by a fraudulent, boiler-room, stock-scamming outfit many years ago, when I had lots of money and not enough time on my hands. Fortunately, I was able to sue them and get all my money back, but I learned the following simple lessons:
Don’t believe most hot stock/business tips. Most are either fraudulent, uninformed, mere rumors or too late.
Never buy something from a person you don’t know who calls you on the phone.
Never buy something you don’t understand.
Always remember, if it sounds too good to be true it probably is.
Never trust a person just because he/she sounds like a nice, decent person. Of course they seem to be; the first task in scamming a person is gaining the victim’s trust.
If it really sounds like a good deal and you’re seriously interested:
a. Arrange to come to their office for a face-to-face talk (and inspection of their operations).
b. Request that they send you written materials concerning their business and the proposed transaction, but don’t trust those materials completely – they easily may be fraudulent.
c. Do a google search on the company and the proposed deal.
d. Check out the company with the Better Business Bureau, the SEC, state securities regulators, or other appropriate authorities. For example, to check out stock brokers and financial advisors, see: sec.gov/investor/brokers.htm
e. Don’t let them pressure you into avoiding such prior-research with stories about time pressure etc. If you can’t check it out first then don’t do it. Don’t trust others to look after you’re best interests.
Especially the bit about buying things you don’t understand.
I would be wary of the premises thing, though. I used to work in a time share scam (quit when I found out that my presentations led to people wasting millions), and they had very nice premises.
I like the Taiwanese phone scammers better, such as this one:
Automatic voice recording in Chinese:
“This is China Telecom, your phone bill is overdue and your phone will be closed down shortly, press 9 for further information”
Mr. He pressing 9 for the heck of it. (Mr. He paid his somewhat overdue bill at Chunghwa Telecom’s office in Yangmei 2 days prior to the call).
Young lady:
“Hello, this is Chunghwa Telecom, what can I do for you?”
Mr He:
“What kind of crap is that you moron, I paid my phone bill in person at your dogshit Yangmei office 2 days ago, What the fuck is going on?”
Young lady desperately hangs up, fooling aroudn with the receive for 2-3 seconds, obviously scared as it’s a foreigner speaking fluent Chinese yelling at her.
You may substitute Chunghwa Telecom with First Bank (called twice), TCC, or FarEastone.
Once I asked one of the young scam ladies about her cup size - she hung up as well.
Another tactic the boilerroom operations use here is to post help-wanted classifieds and enroll the job seekers who turn up in a one or two week “free training course” that ostensibly leads to a position as a “financial advisor” or “salesperson.”
During the course of the training, the recruits learn that they are unlikely to actually be offerred a job, which are “limited in number”, but in the meantime they are exposed to “clients” and “employees” (actors/con artists) “making lots of money” in foreign currency futures trading or whatever. This exposure (plus a seed person or two planted among the new recruits) leads them to spontaneously offer to invest their own money so as not to miss this opportunity. There is a minimum investment requirement – usually several hundred thousand NT – and some sort of imaginary deadline.
Once they put their money in, they never see it again. Either it goes straight into the pocket of the boss, or their account gets churned in trading and it’s eaten up in fees. These operations are especially insidious because most of these recruits don’t have any money to begin with (remember, they’re looking for jobs) and so they borrow money from family or friends to take advantage of this “golden opportunity.” A close friend of mine fell for this hook, line, and sinker. Fortunately, I was finally able to talk her out of going ahead, but it caused some serious unhappiness between us for a while because she thought I was just being a skeptic and missing out on a “golden opportunity.”
I myself also once fall for a scam here – I bought one of those gas safety valves for about NT$5,000 from the jerks who dress up like people from the gas company and sell them door to door. I only found out a few months later when the real gas guy showed up and laughed at me. According to the real gas guy, the valves don’t help, and if anything just add another point from which gas could possibly leak. (I’d thought I was doing my civic duty to keep the apartment building safe from gas fires!) :fume:
has anyone been receiving phonecalls from CHT (chunghwa telecom) about outstanding bills to certain rather large amounts?
I’ve received two this afternoon and they seem to have been from withheld numbers… I found that the calls didn’t specify the number being called, or the callee’s name or anything specific. Nor did it sound like the usual I forgot to pay my phonebill call… Moreover the amount was far in excess of our regular payment! It was about NT$30K rather than our usual $2k.
Yes. Calls like this are a common form of fraud. CHT will send you your bills in the mail as usual. Just hang up on the fraudsters. The post office, CHT, Tax Bureau, etc., will not call you, and no legitimate entity will call from hidden or cell phone numbers, nor will they ask you to call back on another number or to reveal any info like account numbers. And you should never follow instructions to pay a certain fee by ATM in advance in order to get some supposed sum of money like a refunded deposit, tax refund etc. These scams are extremely common in Taiwan. They’ll even call and say “Ma!”, pretending to be a kidnapped daughter or something. Learning to recognize such scams will help protect you from them.
Had this call yesterday. I live very close to the CHT office so the wife said she’d go down and straighten it out. They had no idea what she was talking about when she told them about it.
Same here. Do they really fool anyone with this? Who the hell doesn’t know if they have a 30k phone bill? Who the hell has a 30k phone bill? This may break records for the least profitable phone scam ever.
The gas guys also came around one day. Where I live, everyone lives in four story houses so they went door to door telling everyone there was a community meeting to discuss safety. It took me about three seconds to catch on. My wife thought these things were great and probably would have bought one if I weren't home. I then tried to persuade my neighbor not to buy one but she had already been taken in and nothing was going to change her mind.
There were two young guys selling “safer valves” for the tops of bottled gas once. The things had timers on them, and they did appear to be safer in design by that virtue. But they claimed to be from some government affiliated agency, and they were selling them for a rather hefty price. The sales tactic was high-pressure, and I almost had to resort to violence to get them to leave.
Don’t even let someone like that in the door, folks.
Oh, I almost forgot about the way one of my friends dealt with these scammers. She couldn’t believe how naive they were actually – she very nearly conned them better than they tried to con her.
It was one of those deals where they try to get you to go the ATM machine and unwittingly transfer money to their account in order to get some kind of refund or something. Anyway, she went along with them, knowing perfectly well that it was a scam attempt. Once there, she acted so dumb so convincingly – “Yes yes, I’ve keyed in all the numbers you asked me to, but the screen keeps asking for my password.” "Yes, I’ve transferred the money, but the machine still keeps telling me to press “enter” … that kind of thing ad infinitum.
The scammers were at the point of asking where she was so they could send someone over to help, but she gave the game away when they overheard her talking to the cops on her other mobile.
Still, she kept some scammer away from other potential marks for more than an hour, and that’s the thing they hate more than anything.
I wouldn’t recommend going with them like that. You never know what kind of thugs they might be. It might turn from simple scam to violent robbery. The safe thing to do is hang up in the first place. An air horn might come in handy, just to irritate them too. Anyone know where to buy a pocket air horn to blast into the phone?
Sounds similar, but again, they invited everyone out onto the street for a “meeting” and kind of followed the ones who seemed to have any interest back to their houses. There were about 10 of them there and they seemed to know exactly which folks to target.
