Arbitrage Investment Scams on A Current Affair

Well, A Current Affair have just run a story on “Call centre Scams” – talking to people who have been ripped off by companies claiming to do sports arbitrage trading for them. I am pretty sure this story was mostly initiated by the article ASIC published recently. They referred to the article published by ASIC, including the fact that ASIC have received complaints about 23 different “Arbitrage Investment” companies, but specifically spoke to people who had lost large sums of money (over $8000) with their dealings with AFL Arbitrage (Kent Woodhouse & Associates Pty Ltd).

I’m really glad they ran the story – hopefully it will mean less people will lose such large amounts of money to these companies. My limitation in this role is that people will only find my articles providing general warnings about companies offering such services if they search the internet first. I can’t actively warn people. ACA can at least warn a lot of people *before* they are contacted, and so hopefully this has now been done.

My only regret about the story is that they make it sound like Arbitrage itself is a complete scam. I can understand the need to do this – it is difficult to convey the idea that “Under no circumstances should you trust anyone selling you something like this” while also saying “by the way, the theory behind it makes sense…”. Obviously it isn’t as simple as that, and so it is impractical to go into details. Easier to just say – “It’s a scam, avoid it”.

The most important message in my opinion, is that someone asking you for money, so that they can make you lots of money …they just have to be full of it. If they can make lots of money with any money, why would they need your money? It doesn’t make sense, it never will, so just don’t fall for it.

Here is the video of the story:

Tagged as: ACA, afl, arbitrage, call centre, current affair, kent woodhouse, news, scam, surebet

Date posted:May 30, 2008Post Category :

• Arbitrage Investment Funds
• Uncategorized