Scam alert!

Last week, I mentioned a scam calling itself Marginbase that has taken a lot of money from a lot of people.

The crooks recruiting victims made astonishing promises about how much money could be earned and unfortunately, despite the promises being unbelievable, people still fell for it and lost their so-called “investments”.

Sadly, it’s not the only scam going around.

Several people have been in touch asking about various car dealers in South Africa. The pattern is always the same. They claim to be selling high-end, relatively new vehicles that would normally be very expensive but at remarkable prices. Unbelievable prices. What they’re after is a deposit or, if they can get away with it, the full price. The reality is there are no vehicles or dealership, they’re nothing but a Facebook page with pictures stolen from legitimate pages. We’re also continuing to hear from consumers about various so-called colleges that offer to teach us how to make millions either from foreign exchange trading or from buying and selling cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Ask yourself this question. Why would they do this? Why are they trying to teach us how to trade these incredibly high-risk things? There’s only two reasons. The first is simple and not suspicious. They want to make money by teaching us and then leave us to take enormous risks with our money. The second is more dangerous. They plan to eventually take our money and “invest” it for us. That’s where the real risk occurs because they’re almost certainly not registered with NBFIRA, they’ll almost certainly take our money and never give it back. It’s happened many times before and we keep falling for it. Be warned.