My Instincts were Right!

Four and a bit years years ago I wrote about my experience with using a financial advisor. I talked about all the reasons he did not impress me and I stopped using him after about three months.

Bill sent me a link to a news story about this man and there are any number of headlines online about him.  I gather he told some of his clients that he was investing their money in a property scheme in India but in fact he was running a Ponzi scheme and took a total of £2.6 million pounds from (reports vary) between 37 and 41 people.

1. A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation where the operator, an individual or organization, pays returns to its investors from new capital paid to the operators by new investors, rather than from profit earned by the operator.

I'm grateful that I got shed of him when I did.  I doubt I would have invested in his property scheme but then he always did give me the creeps, for all the reasons I wrote about earlier. I don't think my intuition is terribly fine tuned, but I do recognise inconsistent behaviour and dubious ethics when I see them. And I've always believed that if something seems too good to be true...give it a miss. I'm fairly risk averse, I'm afraid.

I do wonder at the people who get caught out by shysters like this man. Are they completely unobservant? Greedy and unethical themselves? Or impossibly naive?

I hope you've never been caught out - I do hear stories about people who have been.