And you? Did you say yes?

Some­body is offering you a very promising invest­ment with an attrac­tive return on the Internet? Take part in our thought exper­i­ment, and learn all about (recog­nising) this scam. Don’t invest your sav­ings with fraudsters!

A very rep­utable-looking dig­ital trading plat­form catches your eye, adver­tising via the Internet, tele­phone calls or social media. It promises high returns at low risk. Some research using your search engine even reveals excel­lent ref­er­ences for this pur­ported finan­cial institution.

You are not expected to take great risks either. Simply fill in a con­tact form, and a seem­ingly com­pe­tent person then rings to advise you to invest some small sums of money only. What could pos­sibly go wrong?

After your first (small) invest­ment, you are given access to their cus­tomer portal where you can watch your invest­ment increase in value. Who wouldn’t then raise their stake?

In addi­tion, your are offered some fur­ther lucra­tive invest­ments – of course, there’s a time limit or lim­ited avail­ability due to high demand for them all. Why shouldn’t you go for it?

You have earned a small for­tune and would like to have part of your profits paid out to you? No problem, just con­tact your per­sonal advisor to do so. This advisor doesn’t think it’s a good idea and rec­om­mends investing some more funds instead. If how­ever you still insist on receiving a payout, it is of course pos­sible to have part of your money returned to you, against pay­ment of a trans­ac­tion fee or tax.

Unfor­tu­nately, except for some small sums of money which only serve to earn your trust, you will never get your invest­ment money back. Not to men­tion your reputed profits.

Now there is nothing for it but to con­tact your bank and stop any poten­tially open trans­ac­tions and file charges with the police.

When you are then con­tacted by people claiming to be policemen, pri­vate detec­tives, lawyers, pros­e­cu­tors or even working for Interpol, you should best ignore them all. These are prob­ably people asso­ci­ated with the fraudsters.

And would you now still say yes? Cer­tainly not! Because you are now aware of this scam and will follow these rules:

• You will not be daz­zled by unre­al­istic returns. No rep­utable finan­cial ser­vice provider would ever promise to achieve high returns in a short period of time.
• You will not be pres­surised by any finan­cial adviser or time-lim­ited offers. The less time you have to make a deci­sion, the more time you should take to con­sider it. Lit­er­ally do what the old saying rec­om­mends, and “sleep on it for a night”. There is more wisdom to this than you would think.
• You research and check every offer. And not using your search engine, but with the right places: With FINMA, to check whether your con­tact person has a licence or is included on their black­list, and with the cen­tral busi­ness name index whether it lists your finan­cial ser­vice provider.
• FINMA is also the place to notify if you dis­cover a sus­pi­cious offer. This way, non-licensed providers can be traced and removed from the market.

Fur­ther infor­ma­tion on invest­ment fraud can be found under “Invest­ment Fraud” and under https://www.skppsc.ch/de/download/anlagebetrug/ (Swiss Crime Prevention).