High yield investment program
High yield investment programs have emerged as a sort of perfect crime of affinity fraud -- the idea is (as with all cons) gain the confidence of the gullible and desperate, strip them of their money in a completely off-the-books manner, and then run as far as you possibly can. The angle in this case is the old "international bankers" are holding out on the lumpenproletariat -- while they talk about hedge funds and mutual funds to the public, they're really hiding a complex web of trusts and investments with unbelievably high interest payments where all the real money is made.
| I, the crown prince of Nigeria, offering you Scams |
 |
| Scams |
| Frauds |
|
v - t - e |
What the rich don't want you to know is that there is a secret banking system that only they have access to. It operates outside your borders and can't be touched by your tax authorities, but there are a few people who know the secret, and they're more than willing to pool money from you and people you know to get you in on this secret. You see, these secret investments are like super-hedge funds that have an astonishingly high yield on principal invested in their programs, but anything smaller than mid-seven digits is small change as far as they're concerned. What you have to do, you see, is give the nice financial adviser in the business suit a big whack of cash, all wrapped up in aluminum foil and stuffed into paper bags, and then... what? You don't want to? You mean you don't want to be rich? Wimp.
External links
- Quatloos.com's page on high yield investment programs, including the infamous Omega scam in the late 1990s (which turned into the altogether more bizarre NESARA scam)