Things to avoid

The list of things consumers should avoid is a long one. Let’s begin with hire purchase.

Hire purchase is one of the worst ways to buy anything. The only thing I can think of that’s worse is borrowing money from a money-lender in order to buy things. But hire purchase comes a close second.

The biggest problem is not actually that buying something on HP typically doubles the price you pay. It’s not even that when you buy something on HP you don’t actually get to own it until you’ve made the very last payment. Until that point the sofa, fridge or laptop you thought you owned still actually belongs to the store and the moment they feel like it (if you’re a moment behind with your payments) they can come over to your house and take their products away again. The problem isn’t even that you’ll still owe them all the money.

The real problem is that if you sign a hire purchase agreement you are almost certainly unprotected by the law. The Hire Purchase Act, which was originally passed in 1961, says that the protections offered by the Act only apply to agreements where the total credit price is under P4,000. I recently looked at the advertisements from stores in the weekend newspapers and out of 67 items offered for sale on HP, only 4 of them were for items less than that limit. So the Act almost certainly doesn’t apply to you if you’re unwise enough to sign a hire purchase agreement.

So you should avoid hire purchase agreements.

You should also avoid foreign exchange or currency trading. In fact Forex trading has the potential to ruin your finances. A reader contacted us recently asking about one particular web site that offers to multiply (“leverage” is the technical term) your investment by up to 200 times, effectively giving you millions of Pula to trade with. What they neglect to tell their customers is that it works both ways. Yes, if you can correctly predict the fluctuations in the exchange rates between currencies you might make some money. They conveniently forget to tell you that it also means you can lose your entire “investment” in moments if the exchange rates go the other way. Within minutes of searching online I found stories of people who had lost over half a million Pula in moments trading Forex.

Another reader also asked us about a web site calling itself “23Traders”. He said that “they phone me everyday to invest on them, there is a guy who normally phones me telling me to deposit up to 10 000 US dollars so that I can make good profit”. Anyone who is that keen has an agenda they’re not telling you about. It’s curious that this company, who claim to be registered in Anguilla (an island in the Caribbean with a population half that of Ramotswa) and who claim to have a subsidiary in London are calling this reader from a number in Manchester.

The simple truth about Forex trading is that it’s a business full of suspicious characters. It’s a business that should be left entirely to the experts and that means experts such as banks and professional investment companies, not mere mortals like you and me.

You should avoid Forex trading unless you own a bank.

You should also most certainly avoid anything shaped like a pyramid. At the moment there are at least three that I know of that are actively recruiting people in Botswana. WorldVentures has been doing the rounds for a few years, promising fantastic holidays in exotic places but they aren’t entirely honest about this. None of this is actually for free. You have to pay to join the pyramid and then all you get are discounted holidays. You still have to buy the holidays, just at a slightly cheaper price.

What pyramid schemes like WorldVentures really sell is the promise of income from recruiting multiple layers of people beneath you, each of whom pays to join and then starts a flow of money up the pyramid, some of which stays with you as it passes by. Of course this rarely happens because it’s almost impossible to recruit the number of people you need to achieve the targets the scheme sets you and the figures produced by WorldVentures prove this. More than three quarters of all recruits never make a single thebe. Of those who do make some money, more than 80% make less than P100 each month and that’s income, not profit.

Consider this. 84% of all the money flowing through WorldVentures is taken by the top 0.8%.

Then there’s EmGoldex, who claim to be selling small quantities of gold. However that is itself suspicious. Since 2012 the price of gold has been steadily dropping and shows no signs of increasing. This is NOT the time to be buying gold.

In fact what they really want is for you to recruit people beneath you and for them to recruit others beneath them.

Authorities around the world have already issued warnings about EmGoldex. In their home country, the Philippines, the powers-that-be the warned people to avoid the scheme and the claims that they could make profits of 500-1,000%. In Colombia EmGoldex was told to immediately cease operations. In October last year the Secretary of State in Massachusetts, USA filed fraud charges against the people operating EmGoldex.

Another reader contacted us saying that a scheme called Four Corners Alliance is “doing the rounds about making loads of money”. Yes, you guessed it, they’re another pyramid scheme offering riches by selling worthless books on financial literacy.

Do I really need to say you should avoid any pyramid-shaped business?

The Voice - Consumer's Voice

Can they keep my money?

We bought electrical supplies from a supplier in 2014, but did not collect all of them. When we decided to get the rest of the material, they kept saying tomorrow and now they claim they have ran two financial years and they wrote it off. They sending us from post to pillar.

To some extent I can understand the supplier’s problem. If you didn’t collect the goods for a year then this would be a considerable inconvenience to them, keeping the goods in stock, occupying space they could use for other purposes. I’m sure you can imagine how inconvenient it would be for a supplier to keep stock for that long when they could sell it to someone else. Given this I think they were probably within their rights to cancel that element of the deal and sell the goods you purchased to another customer.

However, while they can probably dispose of the goods they can’t just ignore their obligations to you. They owe you a refund for those parts you didn’t pick up. They can’t just keep your money. Their excuse about going through two financial years is not your concern. What they should have done is to call you months ago to tell you that they were cancelling part of the deal with you and asking how they should refund you the relevant amount. That would have been the decent thing to do.

Send over their contact details and we’ll get in touch with them to see if they’ll see reason and give you your money back. If they fail to do the decent thing you might need to involve our friends at the Small Claims Court.

Should I join Four Corners Alliance?

There is a group that's doing the rounds about making loads of money called Four Corners Alliance Group. Do you know anything about them and if so are they legitimate?

I'd really appreciate your help on this. Thank you.

We should all be very suspicious about any scheme that tells you that you can make “loads of money”. In particular we should all be cautious about Four Corners Alliance which is remarkably similar to a number of pyramid schemes we’ve seen over the years.

They say that their scheme is “based on three products. A six lesson set, thirty two book Financial Education set, an optional monthly Financial Education Newsletter subscription, and our Online Marketing Academy subscription, both of the latter can be paid for from earnings.”

However what you see when you visit their web site and attend their presentations will be what all pyramid and Multi-Level Marketing schemes really concentrate on: the opportunity to make money from the scheme.

Four Corners Alliance will tell you that they’re not a pyramid scheme because they sell products. Once you’ve joined their scheme you can buy a range of electronic books on financial literacy. But here’s the flaw. Four Corners Alliance will sell you these books for between $16 and $399 but you can also get these and similar books elsewhere for much less than those prices. However as with all pyramid schemes the key thing they encourage you to do is to recruit other people beneath you. In order to do this you need to spend significant amounts of money to buy the right to sell the books and so do the people beneath you.

Unlike some of the real Multi-Level Marketing schemes like Amway and Herbalife who have been forced to publish the income figures for their distributors, Four Corners Alliance don’t do this. They can’t prove any of the claims they make about people becoming rich.

I urge you not to waste your time, effort and money on this and every other pyramid scheme.

A question about the fake Steadford "University"

Someone who preferred to remain anonymous sent us the following message about the fake Steadford "University". We've mentioned them a few times in the past.

"Please help! i have paid Steadford university in US dollars, did all the compulsory subjects, got my topics approved, then they called me to ask for another 900 US $ for accreditation which I paid. They called again and asked for another 4000$ for 'accreditation". When i asked for a breakdown of fees on an official letterhead, their documents to proof that they are a recognised higher education institution, I was scolded and then they told me they will wipe my credits and topics and put my degree on hold if i don't pay. After numerous phone calls and a lot of verbal abuse (from their side), they have now suspended my profile.. and i have no recourse for the plus minus 3600 US dollars i paid. Needless to say i have completed about 40% of my thesis and am sick! they keep on telling me that the state department stamps the degree.. my question to them is: are you a recognised institution, but they will not answer me! what to do?"

This shows what complete crooks the fake university industry are. Vast amounts of money for a worthless qualification that will only land you in trouble with your employer and the law if you're found out.

My problem is how to advise this person because they were anonymous. Hopefully they'll read this.

Steadford "University" is fraudulent, bogus, fake. You bought a fake degree from crooks who don't offer refunds.

Sorry.

Don't panic

You don’t ever need to panic. On all occasions, even you’re suddenly faced with a charging elephant, panicking is usually the worst possible thing to do. Instead you react as calmly as possible, remember your training and do what you were taught to do.

Over the last weeks there have been various stories going around the Internet and Facebook that caused some panic. One particular popular story reported that after an investigation Maggi Noodles have been withdrawn from sale in India.

This started when tests performed by the Indian Food Safety and Standards Authority (FSSA) appeared to show that the levels of lead found in the noodles were much higher than permitted. Their report said that the "sample taken by the establishment of the Commissioner of Food Safety [...] found presence of lead at 17.2 ppm". (“ppm” means "parts per million"). The permitted level of lead in such foodstuffs in India is only 2.5 ppm so if these figures are to be believed the level of lead found is about seven times higher than is thought acceptable. This is particularly worrying for parents because excess levels of lead have been associated with learning and development difficulties in children. It’s one of the reasons that most of us now use unleaded petrol.

However Nestlé, who manufacture these noodles, differ. They say they’ve conducted their own tests which show that the FSSA results are incorrect. Instead they say their results “show that lead levels are well within the limits specified by food regulations and that MAGGI noodles are safe to eat”. Nestlé and the authorities in India are now locked in a court battle with Nestlé arguing about whose results are correct and “issues of interpretation of the Food Safety and Standards Act”.

Meanwhile the concern is spreading. Following pressure from a consumer group in Kenya, the Kenya Bureau of Standards also issued a warning about the noodles and they were subsequently removed from supermarket shelves in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda. The US Food and Drug Administration has also now taken samples to test and concern is also growing here in Botswana. People are posting links to scare stories on Facebook and so far two radio stations have contacted Consumer Watchdog for interviews and advice on who consumers should believe and what we should do to protect ourselves.

So what do we advise?

At the moment all consumers in Botswana can see is an argument between the Indian authorities and Nestlé over two differing sets of test results and how they should be interpreted. Our advice is to watch and wait but meanwhile until we get more evidence we should be sensible and prudent.

If you are concerned then yes, it’s probably best to avoid using Maggi noodles. Either use a different brand or just eat something else instead.

The first challenge for consumers is the lack of definitive information. The second challenge is we live in the so-called “information age” and many people are getting the information they need to make decisions from the Internet. And that’s a real worry. I think that instead of referring to 2015 as being part of the “information age” we would do better to call it the “misinformation age”.

I don’t know what proportion of the information available on the Internet is nonsense but I’m certain it’s a lot. That’s certainly true of anything to do with food. Many people commented about the Maggi noodle story in our Facebook group but soon afterwards someone posted a link to a web page entitled “What Happens Inside Your Stomach When You Eat Instant Noodles?”

This web page, written by “Dr. Mercola”, reported that a researcher had used “a pill-sized camera to see what happens inside your stomach and digestive tract after you eat ramen noodles, one common type of instant noodles. The results were astonishing…” According to the web site “even after two hours, they are remarkably intact, much more so than the homemade ramen noodles, which were used as a comparison. This is concerning for a number of reasons. […] it could be putting a strain on your digestive system […] it will also impact nutrient absorption, but, in the case of processed ramen noodles, there isn’t much nutrition to be had.”

I’m certainly not going to recommend that you eat lots of instant noodles and nor am I going to say you should avoid them. The real problem is the author, “Dr” Mercola.

According to Quackwatch (I urge you to visit quackwatch.com), a site devoted to exposing quackery and health fraud, Mercola

“opposes immunization, fluoridation, mammography, and the routine administration of vitamin K shots to the newborn, claims that amalgam fillings are toxic, and makes many unsubstantiated recommendations for dietary supplements. Mercola's reach has been greatly boosted by repeated promotion on the ‘Dr. Oz Show.’”

In other words, like his host “Dr Oz”, Mercola is a quack who promotes pseudoscience and nonsense and you simply can’t believe what he says. The US Food and Drug Administration have repeatedly warned him to stop making unsubstantiated claims about the various treatments and products he endorses. According to Quackwatch he claimed that just one of these bogus treatments, “thermography” could benefit patients suffering from arthritis, immune dysfunction”, digestive disorders, irritable bowel syndrome, diverticulitis, Crohn's disease, nerve problems, whiplash, stroke screening, and cancer.

Mercola is clearly a high-end quack and charlatan.

Again, I’m not saying that noodles are good for you and I’m not saying you should eat them. What I’m saying is simple. When faced with claims about food safety you should use your brain before making any decisions. Do some research, find out the facts and only then should you make rational decisions. Until then remain skeptical.

And don’t panic.

The Voice - Consumer's Voice

Is this a real job?

I received an email last week from Total Exploration and production Qatar. I applied to be a Senior Driller and they offer me salary of $19,800 per month. I filled an interview form last week and sent them my certificates and a copy of passport. They say they can’t interview me because of network problems. I would like to know if its legit.

[This is how the email began.]

“After evaluation of your application by the screening and selection panel at our Headquarters, I am pleased to inform you that your application has been approved and you have been offered employment in our reputable company here in Qatar.”

[They had earlier said:]

“Due to low voice quality in telephone interviews and Communication problems, we have deemed it necessary for the interview to be conducted online to avoid inadequacies.”

This is certainly a scam.

Let’s face some simple facts. Real companies don’t offer highly paid jobs to people that they haven’t interviewed face to face. Even in these days of Skype there will always be an “in person” interview. When they say that “due to low voice quality in telephone interviews and Communication problems" and that they want to do things “online” they are covering up the fact that they are not a real company without a real office. They are covering up what they really look like.

Then there’s the salary. They say they’re offering you a salary of $19,800, housing allowance of $2,900, “Educational Assistance Benefit” of $2,380 and many other benefits. That all amounts to over P3 million per year. As a driller?

This is all about an “advance fee” that they will demand from you. It will probably be a fee for your visa that they’ll claim you need to pay yourself. That’s what the entire scam is about. Once you pay this they’ll then demand more and more money until either you realise you’re being scammed or you run out of money.

I suggest that you delete any emails you get from them or just tell them that you now know they’re running a scam.

Is EmGoldex real?

I was invited to a presentation given by EmGoldex in Gaborone. Do you think it’s real?

EmGoldex is a pyramid scheme.

The people marketing EmGoldex say that their scheme is an “Online Store for Buy & Sell of Gold Bars from 1-100grams which have the purest rate of 999.9% or 24k Gold”. This is curious because since 2012 the price of gold has been steadily dropping and shows no signs of increasing. This is NOT the time to be buying gold.

In fact the gold is just there to lure you into the pyramid. What they really want is for you to recruit people beneath you and for them to recruit others beneath them. As every one joins money will flow up the pyramid, promising you a small cut but like all other pyramid schemes the people at the top will make all the money. You’ll never recover your joining fee from the trickle of money that will pass by you.

Various authorities around the world have issued warnings urging people to avoid the scheme. The Securities and Exchange Commission in the Philippines warned Filipinos in March to avoid the scheme and the claims that they could make profits of 500-1,000%. The Superintendence of Companies of Colombia ordered the company to immediately cease operations. In October last year the Secretary of State in Massachusetts, USA filed fraud charges against the people operating EmGoldex.

Please don’t waste your time, energy and money from this illegal pyramid scheme.

Consumer Alert - EmGoldex

Presentations are being held in Gaborone by people selling a gold-buying scheme called EmGoldex.

They describe themselves as follows:

"EMGOLDEX specializes in the buying and selling of investment gold bars of different value. Our investment gold is procured and provided only by the top producers internationally."

They say that their scheme is an:

“Online Store for Buy & Sell of Gold Bars from 1-100grams which have the purest rate of 999.9% or 24k Gold”. 

This is curious because since 2012 the price of gold has been steadily dropping and shows no signs of increasing. This is NOT the time to be buying gold.

Here's the truth.

EmGoldex is a pyramid scheme.

In fact the gold is just there to lure you into the pyramid. What they really want is for you to recruit people beneath you and for them to recruit others beneath them. As people join money will flow up the pyramid, promising you a small cut but like all other pyramid schemes the people at the top will make all the money. You’ll never recover your joining fee from the trickle of money that will pass by you.

Various authorities around the world have issued warnings urging people to avoid the scheme. The Securities and Exchange Commission in the Philippines warned Filipinos in March to avoid the scheme and the claims that they could make profits of 500-1,000%. The Superintendence of Companies of Colombia ordered the company to immediately cease operations. In October last year the Secretary of State in Massachusetts, USA filed fraud charges against the people operating EmGoldex.

Please don’t waste your time, energy and money from this illegal pyramid scheme.

How to lose money

I’m certainly not an expert on how you can make money but I do know how you can lose it.

A few years ago we had a visitor to our office. A tearful woman, an intelligent professional in a large organization, had been abused. Could we help?

It turned out that she had been approached by some people who encouraged her to join TVI Express, a company that they said sold travel discount vouchers to their members. In fact the real business of TVI Express was recruiting other people into multiple layers of recruits. It was a pyramid scheme.

Fortunately for her (and unwisely for the people who recruited her) they offered her a written contract to sign. This contract, which she signed in January 2011 when she “invested” P30,500, offered her: “the promise to reap an amount of P84,000 on or before the 10th March 2011 and another P84,000 on the 31st April 2011.”

As you can imagine there was actually no “reaping” of anything and she got precisely nothing from her membership of this pyramid scheme. Are you surprised? What sort of scheme can take P30,500 and turn it into P164,000 in just three months?

You’re right, no scheme can do this.

TVI Express, which was subsequently banned in Namibia, Lesotho, Indonesia and the US State of Georgia, very quickly collapsed but only after it had taken a lot of money from a lot of people. Almost all of them got nothing in return. Our tearful visitor was one of the lucky ones, all because of that contract the foolish people offered her. She didn’t get the riches they had promised her but we were able to force them to give her the P30,500 back. Eventually.

But, you’ll say, we learned our lesson from that scheme, didn’t we? No, unfortunately we didn’t. TVI Express was very quickly followed by WorldVentures, an almost identical pyramid scheme that also claimed to trade in travel discounts. WorldVentures still exists today.

Pyramid schemes like these are very good ways to lose money.

Then there was the big one. The one that we should have learned from: Eurextrade. I suspect that more people lost money in the Eurextrade Ponzi scheme than any other scam Botswana has ever seen. Certainly some people lost a lot of money. We heard of one victim who sold two houses and a Range Rover so he could “invest” in the scheme, hoping to earn the 2.9% daily interest they promised. Needless to say he lost it all. While we were doing our best to alert people about the scam I received a very angry call from one investor who told me about how he was making a lot of money from it. He told me that so far, he’d received P3,000 in profits. So I asked him how much he had invested so far. P10,000, he said. We then had a lengthy argument where he tried to persuade me that he was up by 30% and I tried to persuade him that in fact so far he’d lost 70% of his investment. I never heard from him again.

Some of the other victims were less wealthy. A reader contacted us shortly after a public holiday when she had returned to her home village, telling us that “all the Grannies” in the village had given their entire life savings to a guy who recruited them into the scheme. They are the one I feel sorry for, not the guy with (but now without) the houses and the car.

Ponzi schemes like Eurextrade are also very efficient ways of losing large quantities of money.

While the stock market can be a very good place to invest your money, it’s surrounded by some dubious characters who are keen to help you part with your hard-earned money. Do you remember Stock Market Direct, the supposed stocks and shares training company whose founder ended up skipping the country with the millions he’d taken from the people he’d persuaded to let him invest for them?

Then there are all the little scams that come and go (often with your money).

Karatbars was a German scheme that involved buying minute quantities of gold and which promised riches as a result. In fact the price you paid to buy this gold was much higher than the real gold price and besides, the price of gold has been steadily dropping since 2012 so it’s hardly a great investment. What was more interesting was how they marketed their business in Botswana. One of their local representatives claimed that the German Embassy, the Department of Mines and BURS had all endorsed their scheme. This wasn’t true and I know this because I asked them and they all denied it. Then came an even bigger lie. They said that the “doubting thomases then went to consumer watch dog. They also gave us a thumbs up.”

That was a complete lie. Not only had we never given then “a thumbs up”, in fact we’ve been saying that they’re a pyramid scheme and that people shouldn’t ever, under any circumstances, join their ridiculous scheme.

Karatbars was just another way to lose money.

These are just a few examples of the ways unscrupulous people will help you lose money but there are many, many more out there. You and I really have to be increasingly skeptical of almost everything someone tells us, particularly if the person wants us to hand over our hard-earned cash and particularly if they claim they can make us rich.

The Voice - Consumer's Voice

They listed me as a bad payer!

I would like to share with you the bad, awful, unprofessional services I received from a furniture store.

We entered into agreement last year, I bought the couch on credit at their store. And they delivered a damaged couch, I immediately informed them and they took a step and came to inspect the couch, they did conceded that it is indeed damage. They agreed to help me by repaired it, after repair, the couch came in the same condition.

There was no proper communication from their part as to what will happen after they failed to repair the couch. I expressed my displeasure many times at their store, about the slow and awful service I received.

The issue was dragging for long and decided to cancel the deal. They did agreed on January this year, I furnished them with a letter of cancellation and they did agreed and refunded me while took their couch. Since January 2015, till now the authorities have not cancelled my credit. My name is currently appearing in the system showing that I owe about P13,000 and it has closed door for me on my other dealings.

I appeal to you to help me, make the authorities understand the urgency of the matter, as well as my credit reputation, help by push them to clear my name on the system because I currently do not owe them anything.

My credit reputation is dented because of their slow, unprofessional way of doing things.

Firstly accept my congratulations on standing up for your rights, demanding solutions and, above all, for finally cancelling the deal.

I contacted the MD of the furniture store and his team confirmed that your contract had indeed been cancelled on 13th January. One of the team said “I do note that the customer was not happy with the quality of the couch he purchased and the after sale service. I will investigate the poor service and take the appropriate action immediately. I will also check why the system still shows that he owes us even though the contract was cancelled in January.”

I’m sorry that you had to endure months of frustration but I’m glad that things are now sorted out.

Can I get my car repaired?

I bought a second hand car at a garage in Mogoditshane in December and now its giving me problems. They say my guarantee was three months so now they can’t help me because my guarantee is expired. Thing is this problem has once occurred back in February but it was not as bad as now plus it was not occurring often. So the problem starting reoccurring and becoming worse sometime in April, I took it for service because I had thought that maybe it needed to be serviced.

So from the service there was a report that stated the problem thats when I contacted the garage where I bought the car. I explained everything but they said they can’t help me because my guarantee has expired. The receipt states that all cars are sold as is; customers are allowed to do thorough checking of the car before buying, there is guarantee stated.

Please help me because I don’t know what to do now.

I’m sorry to hear of your problem.

Many garages say that things are sold “as is” which provides them with some limited protection but this one seems to have been slightly better by offering the three months.

Unfortunately you should have reported to the garage during the 3-month guarantee period, as soon as you noticed the issue, rather than waiting for it to get worse. Ideally you should have given the vehicle a thorough test before buying it and than again on the day you drove it away. Any problems should then have immediately been raised with the seller.

I’m sorry but I’m not sure there’s much you can do.

Maggi noodles - are they safe?

Source: The Hindu

You may have heard that following an investigation Maggi Noodles have been withdrawn from sale in India in the last few weeks.

Following pressure from a consumer group, they have now also been withdrawn in East Africa.

This started when tests performed (131Kb pdf file) by the Indian Food Safety and Standards Authority appeared to show that the levels of lead found in the noodles were much higher than permitted. Their report suggests that the "sample taken by the establishment of the Commissioner of Food Safety [...] found presence of lead at 17.2 ppm" (ppm is "parts per million"). The permitted level of lead in such foodstuffs in India is only 2.5 ppm.

Meanwhile Nestlé, who manufacture these noodles, say that they have conducted their own tests which show that the Indian results are incorrect. They are now taking legal action in India to overturn the ban.

The concern is spreading. The US Food and Drug has apparently now taken samples to test and concern is also growing here in Botswana. People are posting links to scare stories on Facebook and so far two radio stations have contacted us for interviews.

So what do we advise?

At the moment all we consumers can see is an argument over two differing sets of test results. Until we get more evidence we should be prudent.

Don't panic. Just be cautious until further tests are published and we can know the truth.

Fake universities

Here's a list of all the fake "universities" we've reported on in the last few years. If you ever see or hear that someone claims to have any qualification from any of these bogus establishments be very suspicious.

• Almeda University
• Ashwood University
• Atlantic International University
• Baytown University
• Belford University
• Belltown University
• Collins University
• Fargo University
• Grant Town University
• Hadley University
• Hansford University
• Headway University
• Kennedy University
• Knightsbridge University
• McGraw University
• McKinley University
• Mount Lincoln University
• MUST University
• NewFord University
• Northern Ireland Institute of Business and Technology
• Northern Port University
• Olwa University
• Pacific International University
• Panworld University
• Payne Springs University
• Raeford University
• Richford University
• Riverbanks University
• Rochville University
• University of SouthCentral Los Angeles
• Woodfield University

And these are just the obvious fakes. How do you really know that the degree certificate from a real university is the real thing? With Microsoft Word and a colour laser printer you could produce something very persuasive in a matter of minutes.

Here, for example, is an entirely fake degree certificate that I stole from Belford "University" and adjusted. It took minutes.

Call us DR Consumer Watchdog in future please!

Too good to be true

Some things are too good to be true.

Sometimes it’s obvious. The orphaned daughter of the West African millionaire stranded in a refugee camp who now wants to share her inheritance with you? Too good to be true.

The job in a far-flung country with the extraordinary salary and amazing conditions that you didn’t actually apply for and for which you haven’t been formally interviewed? Also too good to be true.

The charming person you met on Facebook who now say they love you and has sent you a package containing a variety of valuable goodies but which is now held in customs in a foreign country and can only be released when you pay them some money? Too good to be true.

The offshore investment scheme that offers you returns of nearly 3% every day? WAY too good to be true.

The foreign exchange web site that offers to multiply your “investment” by up to 200 times so you can make fortunes, despite you not being a trained and experienced Forex dealer? That’s something else that’s too good to be true.

Those last two are in fact particularly dangerous. Eurextrade ruined many people in Botswana with its promises of fabulous profits and hid well the fact that it was a Ponzi scheme run by international gangsters. The Forex trading issue also has the potential to ruin you as well. A reader contacted us recently asking about one particular web site that will multiply (“leverage” is the technical term) your investment by up to 200 times, effectively giving you millions of Pula to trade with. What they neglect to tell their customers is that it works both ways. Yes, if you can correctly predict the fluctuations in the exchange rates between currencies you might make some money. They conveniently forget to tell you that is also means you can lose your entire “investment” in moments if the exchange rates go the other way. Within minutes of searching online I found stories of people who had lost over half a million Pula in an instant trading Forex.

Pyramid schemes like WorldVentures are also too good to be true. While they promise fantastic holidays in exotic places they often aren’t entirely clear that none of this is actually for free. You have to pay to join the pyramid and then all you get are discounted holidays. You still have to buy the holidays, just at a slightly cheaper price.

Of course what pyramid schemes really sell is the promise of income from recruiting multiple layers of people beneath you, each of whom pays to join and then starts a flow of money up the pyramid, some of which stays with you as it passes by. Of course this rarely happens because it’s almost impossible to recruit the number of people you need to achieve the targets the scheme sets you. The figures produced by WorldVentures prove this. More than three quarters of all recruits never make a single thebe. Of those who do make some money, more than 80% make less than P100 each month and that’s income, not profit.

Consider this. 84% of all the money flowing through WorldVentures is taken by the top 0.8%. Pyramid schemes (and their cousins, Multi-Level Marketing schemes) are too good to be true.

Then there’s holiday clubs. They sell the idea of fantastic discounts on flights, hotel stays and accommodation but the truth isn’t quite as good. Firstly, there’s the major flaw in all these schemes. You have to pay a membership fee to join before you get the discounts. Why would you want to do this when almost all hotel chains offer discounts for free? I have never paid the full rate in a South African hotel. Not once. Hotel chains offer similar discounts entirely for free depending on the days you want to stay with them.

Then there are the points-based timeshare holiday clubs that offer you the chance to stay at a variety of locations for free, subject to the number of points you’ve bought and so long as you’ve paid their annual fees. These also have their problems. Some, such as The Holiday Club and Flexiclub are constantly being criticized for their contracts which customers sometimes find almost impossible to cancel if they change their minds. The Holiday Club used to have a clause in their contract stating that the customer had made an “irrevocable offer” to join the club, one that seemed almost impossible to cancel. You were effectively a member for life.

I’ve had a look at the newer version of the Holiday Club terms and conditions and I think they must have learned some lessons. Firstly you have the five-day “cooling off” period that South African law requires (Botswana legislators, are you reading this?). Secondly the “irrevocable offer” clause has disappeared and instead there’s a section entitled “Cessation of Membership”. This is what it says:

“A Member shall cease to be such when he ceases to be the registered holder of Point Rights / Shares in terms of the issue to him of a Point Rights / Share Certificate.”

So you can cancel your membership when you sell your points. But that’s the issue. It’s sometimes impossible to find anyone who’ll buy them. You can’t just walk away. You don’t have the right to tell them that you’ve had enough, you’ll pay your year’s fees and you’ll walk away from the deal. You can only do this with their permission, something that can be hard to get.

We first wrote about The Holiday Club way back in 2007, exposing their “irrevocable offer” issue and that clearly angered them because within days we had silly legal threats from their attorneys. Clearly we had touched a raw nerve. I just hope that consumers these days have a better understanding of their rights and the sort of contract they should never sign. Like many other things these offers can be way too good to be true.

The Voice - Consumer's Voice

Should I trade Forex?

I had come across a UK based stock investment company trading by the name UFX markets, website UFXMarkets.com. I had not made any investment yet, but I was asking if you could make an investigation regarding the genuineness of these stock traders and advice me on whether they are genuine and worth investing with.

The company you mention, UFXMarkets, offers customers the chance to trade in foreign exchange from the comfort of their home over the internet. However I urge you to be VERY careful before you do this. I have found several complaints from people who lost large amounts of money trading with this company.

Any form of online Forex trading is HIGHLY risky, particularly when it’s “leveraged”. Many Forex traders offer “leveraging” which massively increases the amounts of money you can trade. UFXMarkets say that they can increase your investment by up to 200 times. While this means is that your earnings can theoretically be high, but it also means that your losses can be immediate and complete. You can lose everything in an instant.

You also need to understand that Forex trading is not a “zero sum game”. In some trading situations for every thebe one person makes, another loses one thebe. In stocks and shares the total amount of wealth can increase meaning that everyone wins. With Forex trading when you include the charges that brokers like UFXMarkets it’s clear that people lose money overall.

Forex trading is best left to real experts like corporate investors and banks and even they don’t get it right all the time.

I urge you to think very carefully before trading Forex.

Update: UFXMarkets claims on their web site that they are "registered with license number 51 as a Trading in Securities Service" with the International Financial Services Commission of Belize. They even provide a link to the Belize IFSC web site to prove this. However here's a curious thing. They're not actually listed there. Are they even real?

Is this real?

A reader asked us if the following email he received was genuine or a scam.

“Philippine and Vanuatu has been hit by Typhoon and we the American Red Cross are still seeking for able men and women who could assist in the rescue mission and on going rehabilitation process of building , bridges, roads etc. Interested applicants will be paid 500usd daily. Only 50-200 persons are needed to complete our limit. First come, first serve.
Interested Applicants should send their recent or past resume to jobs@recruitredcross.org”

This is certainly a scam. To begin with the quality of the language isn’t what you’d expect from the “American Red Cross”. Then there’s the money they’re offering. There’s no way that the Red Cross pays aid workers $500 per day, that would be over P100,000 per month. That’s ridiculous. These scammers have even created a fake American Red Cross web site that looks like a good copy of the genuine site, except none of the links work but I can see how someone might be fooled into thinking they were dealing with the genuine article. And guess where the fake web site, supposedly of the American Red Cross, is registered? Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, and it was registered last year by the same person who registered a number of other sites used by scammers.

This is the beginning of a well-known advance fee scam. Sooner or later these scammers will ask YOU for money in order to get this fictitious job.

In fact the American Red Cross have warned people about these scams which have previously mentioned other disasters around the world.

I suggest that you delete this email and any others than come out of the blue offering you either jobs, fortunes or romance. Remember that if something seems too good to be true it almost certainly IS too good to be true.