Thanks for all the replies, guys.
This is what happened:
A few years ago I became interested in learning to trade the Forex (foreign exchange) market. I found a website called Forex Factory, probably one of the largest online communities dedicated to trading. After a few months on that site, I noticed a member (called "jacko") was almost universally praised as one of the best traders around, and he was offering a year of mentorship for the cost of 500 dollars. So after some time I decided to go for it, sent the guy his 500 dollars, and I joined the group of people he was mentoring at that time. He seemed like a really great mentor, and I recouped my initial 500 dollars and then some by following his advice and trades. He would always answer any question I had about trading, and we communicated mostly by e-mail and SMS.
About a year later, he told all members that he was starting a "managed fund". A managed fund is a pool of money traded by the fund manager. So if the fund manager makes a 2 percent profit on a trade, all the people in the fund make a 2 percent profit on their investment. I didn't join the fund at first, but it all looked really legitimate - he would notify us about his trades in advance and there was never any suspicion that he was faking his results. So about half a year later I did join the fund (I wired 27K to the company, which was based in Hong Kong), and for the next year and a half the fund "grew" at about 30-40 percent a year. One time I took about 7 thousand dollars of my own money out of the fund and wired it back to my account, just to see that it was ok. Since there were no problems and I got the money I asked for, I wired it back to the fund. You have to understand that to all of us he was more like a friend - we would e-mail him and SMS him, and he would always answer us kindly and politely.
Well, a couple of weeks ago all the investors got a message saying the company was shutting down and that each investor would be getting back their money in late July - early August. By early August all communications with "jacko" and with his company ceased, the company cell phones could not be reached anymore, and the website went down. That's pretty much it. He hasn't been answering our e-mails ever since. Some people invested a lot more (some even as much as 80-100K).
Here's the thread on Forex Factory where you can learn more, if you want:
http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread. ... 6&page=748This links to the first page when people started suspecting something was wrong.
That's a serious fraud, there are more than one victim, maybe the police can do something about it.
15 Aug 2010, 2:47 pm
