Ben Jones replied 6 months ago.
Thank you. The facts indicate that this is very likely to be a scam, specifically the type known as 'advance-fee fraud'. That is because the victim is asked to make advance payments before anything they have been promised materialises. As there are numerous variations of such scams, the best way to explain how they work is to identify certain 'red flags' which are often present in their build-up. The following are the most common ones:
- You are unexpectedly contacted by a company, which offers to buy existing shares off you. These could be genuine shares that are now worthless, or you could have been unknowingly scammed in the past by being sold shares in a fake or insolvent company. Either way, they have made you a good offer, worth considering
- However, before the transaction can proceed and you get the proceeds, you are asked to pay a sum of money. There are various reasons used for this, such as taxes, clearance fees, administrative costs, legal fees, etc. This is where the advance payment part of the scam comes in.
- On further examination, the company is unlikely to be a real and legitimately registered business. They are also commonly working from professionally looking websites, which have been created very recently, purely for the purpose of the scam. In this case, it is just a year old and registered to an anonymous party. They keep cloning them and registering them under new domains to cover their tracks and avoid numerous negative reviews accumulating