He had accrued several hundred followers. The scammer had set up a profile in my name on Instagram. That should have alerted the woman that something was wrong. The woman sent my wife screenshots of these conversations, and my wife immediately responded “My husband doesn’t talk like that.” The English was very broken. They indicated they were on an assignment overseas, and they had already pressured the woman for money. They used my profiles at places like Investing Daily and Forbes to bolster credibility. In contrast to the message above, in this case a scammer was actually pretending to be me. I told my wife that I had no idea who this woman was, so she investigated. Let me tell you, that’s a dangerous thing to have your wife hear while you are in close proximity to her. She just wanted my wife to know that she and I were having an online affair. Three years ago my wife and I were sitting on the couch together, and a woman messaged her (again, on Facebook). I wanted you to know this because he has been using your photos deceiving me and probably others.”īelieve it or not, this didn’t come as a surprise to me.
He is apparently a scammer but I don’t know who he really is or where he is from. I was very stupid and I believed he would repay me. He said his name is Bryan Shawn and he told me he lives in Livingston, Texas. I met a man on Instagram in Feb 2019 who scammed me over several months of over $80,000. “I have many pictures of you on my phone. Last week I received the following message on Facebook from a woman in Indiana: Simply put, don’t get scammed by someone pretending to be me! A Popular Scam I want to talk about a particular type of fraud that is primarily targets older widows, because it hits very close to home for me. When targeted at retirees, it can sap you of the money that is supposed to last through your golden years.
Jim fink investing daily personal finance scam how to#
Sometimes that involves covering how to avoid being defrauded, which is what I want to discuss today.įraud costs Americans billions of dollars every year. Or you can raise lots of money from investors by letting them pretend to own digital pictures of apes, or by just saying “hey here’s a Ponzi.” Theranos raised a lot of money from investors who did not do too much due diligence, because the world was awash in money and investors got careless that is much, much, much, much more true now, and Theranos looks a little quaint.Each week I use this column to convey a bit of investing insight or to provide some personal finance tips. “In the past year, there has been a notable rush of funding into the high-risk category of early-stage startups, as investors have clamored to get into companies even before they had a staff or product,” the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.
If you want to do it by pretending to have a technology, you can (try electric vehicles!), but these days even that is optional. Raising hundreds of millions of dollars from gullible investors who don’t do much due diligence is not particularly impressive anymore. There was the SoftBank boom, we’ve had a couple of years of SPACs, there is so much crypto. Now of course it is 2022 and we are all a bit more jaded. We talked about it a bunch here at Money Stuff, and at some point I coined a pseudo-Linnaean name for Theranos, E lasmotherium haimatos, the Blood Unicorn. Back in the 2010s this was all viewed as pretty noteworthy stuff, and it was huge news when Theranos’s technology turned out to be fake. In the early 2010s, Elizabeth Holmes pretended that she had invented a new technology to do blood tests, and used this pretend technology to raise several hundred million dollars from gullible investors for her blood-testing startup, Theranos.
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