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.