A Mutual Fund For Online Scams

from the new-ones-born-every-day dept

Reading about all of these scams out there, you really have to wonder how people can be this gullible. Two people are now under investigation for an online scam that appears to have brought in a few million dollars. That, by itself, isn't all that interesting. While it is somewhat amazing that these guys some how convinced people over the internet to give them many millions of dollars, the scam is in what they were selling. While they pitched it as a way to invest in "emerging business opportunities," they were apparently taking this money (siphoning off a somewhat more than reasonable cut for themselves) and then re-investing it into other online scams. In other words, this was like a mutual fund for online scams. You give your money to one set of scammers, and they dump it into a variety of other online scams. Like so many scams, however, these didn't pay off, and the whole thing turned into something of a pyramid scheme, with the two guys taking money from later investors and giving it back to earlier investors as their supposed "returns" on their scam investments.
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