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A Current Affair go after Suncity Equities and Investments Scam

Posted by Aegist on October 23rd, 2008

A Current Affair (ACA) have just run a second story on Arbitrage Investment Scams operating out of the Gold Coast - this time focussing on Suncity EI. They ran a story about 4 months ago on the same topic, but focussed their attention on Kent Woodhouse (AFL Arbitrage) - I wrote a short article on that at the time, and you can see it here.

This second installment on this topic was almost identical to the first story, just with different names and stories. There was the same amount of chasing people through offices, and down the street, all while talking to the poor victims of these scammers about how much money they have lost.

I have to admit that I find it a little odd that at no point have ACA contacted either myself, or anyone at ArbForum. You cannot look into this field and not accidently find yourself either here, or on arbforum - combined we have far more information on arbitrage trading, and these arbitrage investment scams than anywhere else online. Yet I still haven’t heard anything from them - which is particularly odd when you consider that I actually contacted ACA (and Today Tonight) myself about these scams over 6 months ago myself - well before they ran the first story.

I guess they aren’t interested in actual information - they just want the hard fast ‘fear’ and ‘hype’ associated with the story. I understand that. The story is too complicated to bother with details when all you really want is for people to know “Arbitrage Companies Bad - avoid at all costs”. It isn’t completely true, but for the most part it is probably the easiest message to get out to the mass public in a useful way.

Their breif clip of someone from the ACCC talking about these scams as “just gambling” was very much like what they said in the first story they ran too. Again, I would like to highlight the fact that what these companies actually do with your money is virtually irrelevent - the scam is that they won’t pay it back as promised. They are Ponzi Scams, and they don’t actually do anything with your money - neither arbitrage, nor gambling.

Anyway, let this stand as YET ANOTHER warning to all of the people who regularly contact me wondering whether they should invest money in company X, Y or Z. Hopefully the answer will be blatently obvious by now…

Here is the ACA Clip:

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Risk Free Profit has disappeared - More money left owing.

Posted by Aegist on October 18th, 2008

This is a topic which I unfortunately have some history with. Risk Free Profit created the software SureBetPro and distributed it through an MLM network - quite clever really because it really took advantage of peoples desire to make easy money on several different levels at once.

It was through the MLM approach to distributing their software that I, and many other people were introduced to the concept of arbitrage trading. SureBetPro (SBP) was the first arbitrage software I ever used, and if it wasn’t for Risk Free Profit (RFP), this website wouldn’t exist. In the beginning I defended RFP against numerous people who claimed they were a scam - the fact was that I was using SBP actively, and making money using it. The price they charged for the software was reasonable; $140 a month; no multi-thousand dollar bills like some of the modern scams, and the software did pretty much what it claimed to do (not brilliantly, but functionally all the same). So based on the fact that they had a reasonable product, being cleverly marketed, it seemed reasonable that they should be a legitimate company. Why rip people off and risk retribution, legal retaliation, and/or prison time when you can make legitimate profits? Well turns out that even the most reasonable looking situations can still result in way too many people being scammed out of their cash.

RFP ran a member only trading pool where members could invest $600 - $1000 for a limited period of time. Everything about this trading pool sounded perfect. It made no unreasonable promises; your profits were not promised, they were based on actual results. The amount you could invest was limited to a reasonable amount so that everyone could have a fair go. The investment was restricted to a specific time frame; no long term compounding issues. And there was even an incentive for the company to offer this - in order to claim any trading pool profits, you had to be a full time member of RFP - ie, you had to keep making your $140 USD payments every month without fail. So the pool looked like a clever tool to ensure their member base never shrunk…

But I was wrong. After a little over a year of running the trading pool the first round of payments started to be made. And they were made successfully. People happily posted their profits at various online forums, doing the usual HYIP fan-boy thing by cheering for RFP and proclaiming their faith in the goodness of RFP etc etc. Having the exact effect every Ponzi scheme could ever hope for - creating the illusion that this company is reliable and safe to invest in. More people surely invested significantly more money into the trading pool. Numerous people paid out in the first round undoubtedly put more money in for another turn. And it wasn’t long after this that RFP suddenly started having ‘Problems…’ with their payouts.

The list of reasons were bloody interesting actually. I think the first excuse was that their bank account froze their funds because of the massive movement of money out of international bookmakers - it flagged money laundering concerns. The bank supposedly froze their funds, and RFP had no option but to wait for the banks to resolve their concerns. Apparently the bank would hold the funds for 6 months before releasing them again. Yeah right, as if Banks have the right to just take money from their customers and hold them for arbitrary periods of time, just because they want to. Apparently RFP could do nothing about it, and had to swallow it - I mean, the members who were owed money had to swallow it.

Some time after that 6 month period passed, still no pool pay outs. I think it was at about this time that the US passed the safe ports act, and Neteller found itself in trouble with the USA. It was being investigated by the FBI, and it did actually have a lot of its funds frozen. RFP jumped straight onto this band wagon and started claiming that this was the new reason they couldn’t make payouts now - their money was trapped in Neteller by the US government. There was nothing they could do about it! Everyone would just have to keep on waiting. No mention was made of the previous ‘money frozen in bank accounts’ excuse of course…

At this stage over a year had passed since they had stopped making any sort of payment from their members only trading pool, and I had, like most other people no doubt, completely lost interest. I had stopped using SureBetPro many many months before hand (it had lost any competitive edge it may have once held, and I found other software better and cheaper on the market), and so RFP was of no interest to me. I’m sure there were a few other headline worthy excuses for why their members own trading pool money couldn’t be paid to those members - I wouldn’t be surprised if the current standing excuse was because the bank they had the money frozen in has just collapsed under the credit crunch and all of the money has been lost!

So anyway, for all of this time SBP has continued to be on the alert service listing page because it has continued to provide an arbitrage alert service. The dodgy operations of RFP have given me cause to warn people away from RFP and SBP for a couple of years now, but the alert service has continued working regardless - just without any sign of improvement, upgrade, or clearing of old junk (the damn software still has a filter in it for pointbet and several other LONG deceased bookmakers).

In the last couple of months though, it seems RFP has finally left us for good. A couple of people have contacted me letting me know that they can’t get on the RFP website. If you follow the link from the alert services it takes you to a default Apache page, and this has been the case with every other SBP link i can find online. However, if you go to http://www.riskfreeprofit.com, the website does still seem to be there. Historically, you can only register with RFP through a referral. Maybe RFP have simply cut off all of the old referral links but are still operating, but I’m not willing to try to register to find out

Whatever the actual case though, this is a long winding sad story of people losing money to a greedy company - like so many other stories on the internet.

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Arbitrage Scam Websites Targetted in Australian Crackdown

Posted by Aegist on September 23rd, 2008

The Sydney Morning Herald ran a story today (below) about the investigation being conducted by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) into Australian websites making ‘too good to be true’ claims. Arbitrage Betting investment schemes, and the over-promising over-priced Arbitrage software companies were mentioned in the investigation, alongside other regular scams like anti-ageing rip offs, other get rich quick schemes, expensive ‘free’ mobile phone services, and genealogy rip offs.

No companies being investigated will be named until after the ACCC finds the company is in breach of trade practices - I look forward to seeing numerous companies which we have discovered and posted about here on SAG being named by the ACCC.

The full SMH article can be read here:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/biztech/watchdog-eyes-140-scam-websites/2008/09/23/1221935618431.html

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Fallout from Suncity Equities and Investments

Posted by Aegist on July 16th, 2008

It looks like another one of these Arbitrage investment schemes has disappeared with a lot of money that they didn’t own. There has been a long line of very upset people posting at ArbForum over the past few days because none of them are able to make any contact with Suncity Equities and Investments at all, and it looks like the company have simply closed up shop and disappeared.

It is worth drawing the attention of any new readers here to an article I published about 6 months ago: St Gallens Investments, Suncity Equities and Investments and other Arbitrage Investments AGAIN and the associated discussion on ArbForum at around the same time: Suncity Equities and Investments

Notice how the person I was directly replying to in my opening post of the ArbForum thread was impressed because Suncity had already paid out money requested? THIS IS NORMAL for a Ponzi scam. This should never be seen as evidence of legitimacy. That same article in which I first mentioned Suncity EI also mentions AFL Arbitrage Systems, the company publicly shamed into hiding by A Current Affair a couple of months ago. I don’t know anything for certain about any of the other companies mentioned in that article yet, but when we post warnings about not investing in companies of this nature, we aren’t making it up just for fun. It is clear that a lot of people have been really badly hurt by Suncity and by AFL Arbitrage systems - and I hate watching it happen.

So, to the next person who posts on ArbForum, or emails me directly about some ‘too good to be true’ arbitrage-like investment scheme which they want a second opinion on, this is my reply to you:

Maybe the company you are asking about is legitimate, maybe they have the most pure of intentions, but there is no way of really knowing. This industry has a shocking record, and any investment made with a company claiming to do anything like this, must be taken as an almost guaranteed loss in terms of risk - I don’t care if they say “No Risk” on their website, the very fact that they say that makes me even more certain they are a guaranteed loss. If someone you know has received payments already from this company, I don’t care - still considered a 99% risk of loss.

The only thing you can really use to make sure the company you are dealing with is legitimate, is to ensure their accountability - force them to take responsibility for whatever they do. A name and a phone number does not make someone accountable. Names can be lied about/faked, and phone numbers can be cut off. You want accurate licensing (appropriate to what they are doing!). You want a large, well known, highly visible company which can not disappear - this forces someone to take responsibility.

In short - my advice is don’t give them your money. You are far more likely to make money by putting it all on ‘0′ at your local casino.

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Arbitrage Investment Scams on A Current Affair

Posted by Aegist on May 30th, 2008

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:

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