Is email from Japan a chance to sell my shares . . . or a scam?
R.M. writes: Many years ago, I foolishly bought shares in Safeguard Technologies, a US company that featured in your column as a rip-off nearly 20 years back. Now though, I have just received a call from a man in Japan who gives his name as David Moody, and he has emailed me with a purchase agreement for my shares. Is this another scam?
THE offer to buy your shares has come from DCP & Consultants, which gives its address as a major office development in Tokyo. The call came from a man who signs himself as David Moody LLB, the Japanese company’s chief legal officer. And the company itself is said to be headed by chief executive Konno Yatsuhiro.
The DCP website boasts: ‘DCP & Consultants has been known to be an outstanding provider of financial and investment strategies that helped many start-up and growing companies across major industries optimise their business operations and secure a solid future.’ The company has, it claims, ‘exceptional mergers and acquisitions expertise’.
So much for fiction. Now for facts. Googling David Moody LLB produced not a single hit, which is pretty unusual, especially for the chief legal officer of an outstanding Tokyo firm. Googling Konno Yatsuhiro produced the same result – zilch!
The contract you received says that DCP & Consultants is a Japanese corporation based in the giant Shinjuku Park Tower. Well, I checked with Japan’s company registry and there is no such corporation.
How about all those claims to have helped new and growing companies? Surely there must be some record of this? Well, no, there is not a single record.
Back to DCP’s website then, and it appears DCP has produced its startling record of success in almost no time at all. The website dcpjapan.com was registered just weeks ago on May 5. The owner of the website hides behind an anonymity service with an address in Iceland. And the domain name fees have been paid for just one year, which does not point towards a firm that expects anything other than to be out of business by next May.
I put all this to DCP itself and invited answers and comments. It offered neither.
So what’s all this about? Well, the sting in the tail is not in the share purchase contract itself, but in DCP’s email to you, where David Moody says: ‘If you agree to sell your shares you will require assistance from our governing body to register the shares under the US Securities Act 1933, rendering them freetrading.’ He says he will call you again to discuss this.
In other words, if you take the bait and agree to sell your shares, Moody and his mates will demand an up-front legal fee for a nonexistent process to ‘re-certify’ your shares before the deal can go ahead. Pay it, and the deal will fall through and your money will have disappeared.