‘Everyone can retire early if high-paying investment schemes are real’

PETALING JAYA: Barely a day goes by without news reports about scam investment schemes but there seems to be no shortage of people falling prey to them.

For example, 216 people lost RM11.3mil to a “syariah-compliant” investment scam two weeks ago.

Curious about what goes on behind such schemes, a Malaysian investment manager who only wanted to be identified as Chris set out to learn how these scammers operate.

Chris, who is also a stock analyst, spotted an advertisement placed on Facebook, which promoted a foreign equity investment that promised high returns of between 7% and 15% a month.

He clicked on a given link and was added to a WhatsApp group.

“I was given details of how the investment returns are structured,” Chris said in an interview.

The group’s administrator claimed to have vast experience in foreign stock exchanges and that he had supposedly paid out millions in profits.

Apparently, the scheme has over 150 members and many of them would pump in their money, some as much as RM100,000, to bank accounts provided by the administrator, not knowing they would end up losing it all.

“Since the schemers have full access to the funds, it is just a matter of time they pull the plug and take off,” said Chris, who has worked in the finance sector for over 25 years and has access to real-time movement of equities in various stock exchanges worldwide.

He said the schemers would use mirror or clone websites with pages identical to those of foreign stock exchanges to manipulate prices to their advantage.

He also found that the schemer was blacklisted by the Security Commission’s Investor Alert List.

As a parting shot, Chris said: “It’s absurd if people think they can double their investment in less than a year. If this is possible, everyone will opt to retire early.”

Federal Commercial Crime Investigations Department director Datuk Seri Ramli Mohamed Yoosuf, when contacted, said the public should always be wary of investment schemes offering high returns that are too good be true.