This is the 2nd video of the Staying Out Of Trouble In China Chapter. I would highly recommend you to watch the video because I have screenshotted a bunch of those scams and put them in the video only. You will not find them in the article below.

Today we shall talk about a common scam that many expats have fallen for and how to avoid such a scam. This is a true story that I am sharing with you today so please take close attention to avoid such a costly mistake.

If you go on wechat groups, you might see an advertisement that looks like this. We’ve got this guy with a bear as his photo saying that you can make money from the comfort of your home by investing on their forex platform. If you don’t know what forex means, it means Foreign Exchange Market where people speculate on legal tender, like Australian Dollars, Thai Bhat and British Pound. You can see that this guy says if you invest 500 you can get 2500 in 24 hours.

Let’s look at this guy Investor Abubakar, who claims to be working for hicoinvest. This guy specializes in cryptocurrency, where he claims to buy crypto from miners and sells to forex traders at a higher rate. Note that he even spelt miners wrong, it should be a single n instead of two ns. This is absolute bogus because the actual crypto miners just sell their coins on platforms like Binance or Coincola for cash by the click of a button. It makes absolutely no sense here.

This guys is also promising an even better deal than the bear guy by offering 5-fold return for his 300 earns 1500 in 4 hour plan. To tell you what, his math is absolutely terrible because the last line says 10000 earns 30000 in 4 hours. I mean shouldn’t it be 50000 instead? Why does the profit decrease when you try to increase your investment? Anyways this guy says profit is 100% guaranteed so I decided to click into his profile and check him out.

You can see that there are 4 videos there with the description of thanks for the trust and profit sent. Let’s open up these videos. So to conclude, all of these 4 guys are saying that this is legit and you will get great profits, but is this actually the case here? I am sorry but no. Once you send money over to that guy, you will never get it back. You will be asked to pay all kinds of fees to get your profit and this is how they will squeeze you dry and scam you.

They start from trading activation fees of 500 RMB, which they promise to add to your investment and profit, then make some new fee called a security fee of 2500 RMB, which is also added to the investment. After the security fee comes the Safety Pin fee of 1050 Dollars. Note that this has escalated to USD, not RMB anymore. And then comes the Transfer Access Pin for 1400 USD. To be honest I don’t really know where they are making this up from anymore. They could ask for a internet access fee, management fee, transaction fee, wallet fee and it doesn’t have to even make sense here. I could make up 20 of these fees on the go.

Somewhere between paying for the fees, they ask for your passport for a procedure called KYC which stands for Know Your Client, and they steal your identity to scam others. When you start worrying about how you can get your money back, they will send you the passport of another victim and claim that they are the person on the passport, and your investment manager, so you must trust them to pay extra fees to get your profit.

Anyways, you get the gist here. You just keep paying and paying for whatever fees they make up, until you find out that it is a scam. They will attempt to scam you one last time by promising that the whatever fee they make up is the last one and that you will get all your money back. Many expats have been scammed amounts ranging from a few thousand to a 6 digit number.

Is there any legal recourse to this? The answer is no. You might be tempted to go after them with legal action by suing the alipay or bank account that you have transferred to, but you will arrive at a dead end because those bank accounts are bought on the black market. The money has been transferred far away overseas by the time you get to the end of this. There are people willing to sell their bank accounts for a few thousand Yuan as that is a lot of money to a person who earns 1000 RMB per month. The scammers buy these bank accounts and use them to collect funds, and just by paying the guy an extra fee, they get him to withdraw cash and that’s the end of the story here. You can sue the guy who sold his bank account, and he will go to jail because it is a crime, but there is no way on earth that a guy who earns 1000 per month can ever pay you back 50,000.

So the moral of the story here is that all of these investment advertisements are scams. It is simply not possible to quadruple your profit within 4 hours, let alone a year! Even Warren Buffet, one of the richest guys on the planet, only averages around 20% per year, and he is the god of investment. So what makes you think some random guy who calls himself investor whatever can beat him? If he has found the magic genie that offers a 5-fold return within 4 hours, why would he be sharing this with you?

Thanks for watching this episode and I hope you have found this entertaining and useful. Stay tuned for our next video on whether or not a breakup fee is illegal!

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