Watching "American Greed"

There seems to be an endless string of them. They must have no shortage of material. Stacy Keach narrates each one in his inimitable style. As soon as one bunch is busted another  crops up, offering the irresistable bait: Great Returns. And the sharks... Big ones... come to get hooked by it.

Now I realize that if they go to all the trouble to make a TV show about the scam, it is probably the whopper of all scams too. And there are a lot of similarities between them all. Charismatic individual with nice partner, driving nice car, has nice office, travels in style, infiltrates high life world to schmooze and groom a high life reputation, lightens everybody's load then runs off scot free with all the loot.

Real estate is a common one. Just forge a document, file it to get the title, and sell it... Over and over. One guy allegedly stored rare wine, drank it instead, replaced it with ripple, and nobody is the wiser. Why not just forge cases of the stuff? They can store your art too, replace it with a forgery, and sell it. The scams are endless.

The frightening thing is the ease with which they are pulled off. But they all guarantee the highest rate of return. Why aren't they investigated then and the phony books outed? Most people roll it back in. It is when they try to get money out, the gig is up in most cases.

The more crafty breed takes that into account to really hook the fish. After all, real funds do the same thing. They will not let you take the money without incurring some sort of penalty. Red Flag Number one is Slow Liquidity, but then red flag number 2 might be too fast liquidity in the Ponzi scheme shuffle game.

Anyways if you are retired and not aware of this program, maybe you should watch it before you become a bit player victim on it. It looks like anything that is more than 13% and is regular seems to be the point where the wheels start to wobble here. Yet a lot of serious direct traders are able to do that safely by hedging their positions. But if it were such a good thing, why wouldn't they put all their money back into it too? Everybody I have seen who is successful is usually pretty frugal. Just sayin'.