Investor Support Groups

Investor Support Groups.

We are often contacted by investors who have fallen victim to follow-on-frauds.  We are also often contacted by investors who have been persuaded to send money to a scammer’s crypto currency account. Those accounts are in countries like Estonia, Ukraine, Romania and others.

In most of those kinds of cases cases we simply can’t do anything at all to recover the money. It is pretty much untraceable. We take a look and don’t charge for our opinion. All we can do is highlight the scam on our blog page with the aim of warning others so that they don’t get taken in by the scam.

It is very frustrating to hear from investors where there is simply nothing we can do to help them. The costs are just too great for investors to bear and the chance of recovery is virtually nil. There are some scams out there where only law enforcement authorities stand any chance of tracing the money and even then the success rate is very low.

The difficulty for an investor is how to persuade their local law enforcement authority to investigate the scam. Many experienced Police officers can tell at a glance what the chances are and they are not keen to spend time on what they perceive to be a lost cause.  We have sympathy for the Police in these cases because some of these follow-on-frauds are highly sophisticated with many, many layers of protections in place. It is a very time-consuming and difficult job to peel away those layers and sometimes it just isn’t possible. Sometimes you peel the layers away and finally come up against a final layer controlled by a Mr Chin Nyugen based in Szechuan province in China. This guy, if he even exists, is one of 1 million Chin Nyugen’s. You’ve reached the end of the line.

We always recommend investors report scams to the Police so that there is a record on the system. In most countries reports can be filed online. The simple truth is that one report is unlikely to lead to an investigation, but the more reports there are the greater the chance that someone will be persuaded to look into it.

Although we often tell people that we can’t help in these cases we have decided that there is something we can do. We have decided that we can put victims in contact with other victims through Investor Support Groups so they can share experiences and you never know, someone might be able to add a piece to the overall jigsaw which makes the picture clearer. We’re not doing this to make money because it is a free service. We are willing to do this just so that people realise they should not feel foolish or embarrassed or give themselves a hard time if they’ve been scammed. Scammers only target nice, decent people who have kind hearts and see the good in others. Scammers don’t waste their time with hard cases.

We will make introductions to Investor Support Groups so that if one person in a group is able to persuade their local law enforcement authority to investigate then the rest may be able to piggy-back on that investigation. We will not do this for cases which we take on ourselves.

Recently we posted an article on Brookfield Investment Funds. We have no chance of catching these crooks and recovering funds. Brookfield Investment Funds is clearly run by an organised and very experienced criminal gang. The quality of their marketing materials, emailed materials, branding, documents and the extent of their reach tells us that this is a very high level fraud. These people are organised and professional. They have several scams operating at the same time and they are taking in millions. If an investor queries the bank account they have been asked to send money to then Brookfield can provide them with another bank account in a different country within the hour. They have a very large choice of money mule accounts. We have been contacted by investors across the world who have been taken in by this fraud so they are ideal to be our first Investor Support Group.

From our perspective we are interested in Brookfield Investment Funds because we believe they are the same people who operated the St Johns Asset Management scam and the Van Gossum Consult scam. We have clients in both those scams and we have been making progress. We haven’t written any updates because the information is sensitive, but when we feel it is right to publish we will.

So, we will be writing to the investors who have contacted us about Brookfield Investment Funds to ask whether they would like to be connected to other victims. This will be the first Investor Support Group we will establish. There is no charge and we don’t want to be involved in it in any way. Investor Support Groups are for investors only and will be managed by investors, not by us.

For some scams, where recovery appears virtually impossible, it can help investors a great deal to be supported by others who have been scammed by the same people. We will check every person we introduce to the groups because scammers always try to infiltrate investor groups.

What’s in it for us ? Well, we hope group leaders will keep us informed if there is a breakthrough. It is surprising how many scams which appear to be entirely separate and appear to have no connection with each other actually involve the same people controlling the scams from the shadows. We know Brookfield Investment Funds is linked to two of our cases, but we cannot charge Brookfield victims to investigate because we don’t charge investors if we believe the chances of recovery are low. However, a group of motivated investors may be able to allocate enough of their time to be able to make progress where we cannot. The key will be getting a local law enforcement authority to pick up the case. If that happens we will provide as much information as we can on the scam and on other linked scams.

On that matter, we have been informed that one of the cases linked to Brookfield Investment Funds has been referred to Interpol. We don’t know much more than that, but if we are contacted we will be happy to provide our background information on these cases. To view the previous article on Brookfield Investment Funds click here.