Recently I lost a lot of money in the markets trading with a dubious company based in USA.
Burton Capital Partners is supposedly based in the US (1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10006, United States) and offers mergers and acquisitions and various other investments. I invested a significant amount with this company over the course of a 3 month period – only to find out that it was a scam! I was outraged at Burton Capital Partners, but to be fair I was more furious with myself.
After a little research I realized that the company’s website had only been registered for around 6 months.
This was clearly a scam and I was too blinkered to realize. Now, this is not the whole story, and this is where things get a little bit complicated. When I had an inkling that Burton wasn’t a legitimate broker, I came across a company called Forex Conclusions.
Forex Conclusions claims to be against dishonest practice and offers a free service to perform reviews and checks on various “boiler rooms” and other companies alike. I could not find any such service anywhere else online so I thought that I might as well give Forex Conclusions a try. After contacting them I was informed that the free service is no longer available…
Up until now we haven’t charged for doing reviews for our readers, but we have changed this policy.
The reason for this is that we receive several requests daily to do reviews of brokers and other financial firms. We just can’t cope with the amount and want to help the readers that need our professional and unbiased reviews the most. This doesn’t mean that we will not be posting warnings and reviews regularly 100% free of charge. We will still keep our readers up to date with warnings from regulators, from our readers and from our own monitoring. We will not charge anything for advise or questions, sent to us by mail or in comments – only for full reviews. We have decided to charge 60 USD for posting a full review. This amount is very, very small compared to losing the money you deposit to a scam broker. We have seen numerous traders being scammed without even knowing it by brokers manipulating prices and using other hard-to-detect practices.
I thought that the payment of 60 USD was fair enough.
However… After various correspondence via email with Forex Conclusions – this secondary scam began to really take place. They gave me a whole load of stories about how they could help me get my money back, which of course, being in a vulnerable position (I’m ashamed to say), I fell for their scam. They had told me that a number of ‘readers’ had been in contact with them regarding Burton Capital Partners and that they were arranging a class action law suit. All telephone conversations were from a blocked number (surprise, surprise!!!).
For me to participate in the law suit against the banks that Burton Capital Partners had used in order to defraud investors – there were further fees that I was inclined to pay. After doing some further research I found this:-
- http://scamfraudalert.org/2013/03/08/economic-frauds-www-economicfrauds-com/
- and this:-
- http://www.ripoffreport.com/r/economicfraudscom/fort-lauderdale-florida-333-38/economicfraudscom-fraudulent-scam-bogus-company-taking-advantage-of-innocent-people-fo-1008992
and this one asking for $150 instead of $60 (with the same stories):-
- http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/economicfraudscom-advanced-fee-fraud-c603008.html
And even a nice video:-
- http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xs52uh_warning-against-economic-frauds-economicfrauds-com_news
If you read the comments on this video – you’ll notice that ‘Economic Frauds’ post a long line of comments ‘defending’ themselves – saying that all of the people that have been scammed by them, are in fact, criminals themselves. So it seems that the people who claim to warn people about boiler rooms and investor frauds are in fact FRAUDSTERS themselves.
It wouldn’t surprise me if all of them are connected and if Forex Conclusions are actually the people behind the initial boiler room scams. There’s plenty more information out there to show that they are all scams. From the ‘whois’ searches that I have now done – it seems convenient or coincidental that http://www.forexconclusions.com’ was only registered at the end of 2013 – around the same time that the other scams had been uncovered.
My advice from personal experience – if it sounds too good to be true – it probably is. Don’t make the same mistakes that I did!
The only good thing that will hopefully come out of this mess – is that my losses might help other people not to lose more money in the future.
The only enjoyment that I will gain is remaining anonymous online so as to gain more information on these crooks as they continue to try to scam me even more.
When they eventually stop calling me – I will post all of their correspondence online so as to further warn people against these criminals in the future.
You may have won the battle BUT THIS IS WAR!