Waited a while for that first post!

Why do people still fall for this ****?
Its so obv. for all the reasons Tooth gave.

I guess some people deserve to lose significant amounts of money if you fall for this ****e.

On the bright side, your investment in this should get you a spot on American Greed as "one of XYZ's victims, amead, tells American Greed this story..."

amead,

I would like to talk to you about this post. Please message me when you get a chance.

https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower - go get that maniez.

If they would have a legit way of providing 12% returns consistently with little drawdown they would have investors lining up begging to take their millions.

So why are they trying so hard to get your friend to put up 10k?

seems legit...this also, likely not a scam *wink*

but man oh man, how have I not seen this thread until now? I mean just wow. A+

OP - I'm curious: was the "ask" of your buddy to participate as well with him in this "definitely not a scam" scam? Or was he just looking for advice from some buddies on what they think?

People seem to have a really big blindspot around one of the core questions I ask myself whenever anyone makes a business proposition...

Why me?

There is cash all over the place for anyone with all their ducks in a row. What do they think I can do for them?

If you can't answer that question with something that sounds sort of rational it's probably a scam. 'He's my *insert relation here* he wants what's best for me' COULD be true if you come from a very business oriented clan of people, but for 80%+ of you they are talking to you because all the obvious options to get money from said no. They all probably said no for a reason.

There is a lot of analysis out there about how scams work. Basically, there are scams targeting all walks of life and different scams take different approaches.

While it should be obvious that a "guaranteed big return from a random person seeking me out" is a scam, it is not so obvious to many people.

This is particularly the case for successful people. If you have any wealthy/successful friends you've probably watched them being approached by all sorts of people; women, fans, investors, fellow wealthy people, etc. Some of these people are opportunists, some are curious/fanboys, some are potential collaborators. I have some acquaintances like this and I've watched it. Doors really open up for these folks in all sorts of ways simply because people know of them.

As a consequence, a lot of deals and opportunities present themselves on an open platter. One friend is a decently wealthy doctor. He has cut lots of deals with lots of people, mostly on pretty speculative real estate side of things. Some of these deals went sour (mostly because of bad market conditions.) Some of my other acquaintances are pretty damn wealthy and while many of these deals have made them even wealthier, they've also been scammed and taken advantage of plenty over the years. It is far from unusual. The reason why we might find it utterly stupid is because we're not the sort of people who get approached all their lives.

Basically, a good number of these folks (1) find nothing unusual about being approached, (2) have made atypical investments in the past, (3) because they are successful in one field and their investments have worked out they have a false sense of security, and (4) they think they're pretty smart and have good judgement and their record only reinforces that.

This thread is beautiful.

So how'd it turn out? Did he invest?

Plot twist, Tooth invested after talking with the masterminds running Oasis. He now is an integral part of their process and is about to show the world how it is done by posting his trades in the prop bet thread.

Get teh popcorn ready because he gone demonstrate teh money making.

I bet in the case of every deal that worked out these people could easily answer the "Why me?" question. One of my (now deceased unfortunately) uncles used to get offered real estate deals all the time, and the vast majority of them were good. This is because he was one of the more successful attorneys in the state and having him on board was good for everyone.

If you have something great money isn't hard to get... so you make people start throwing in other stuff to get their money in. Those are the good opportunities you want. I expect, and get, offers of this sort related to logistics somewhat often.

It's also very helpful that most of the good 'why me?' results also are areas where you are likely a full blown native... Which means that you should be able to validate the offers much more accurately than you would be able to validate something like the OP is bringing.

As someone with a very strong financial background and having spent years in the finance industry..... this is 100% a scam.

No such thing as risk free 12%. Even what you described is not risk free. The stock prices can move. They use a bunch of finance concepts to confuse you.

Also, having made 58B last year, why would they want to get 10K from investor if they are billionaires? They would just trade their capital.

Yes, this has a decent chance of being a scam, but a) there certainly are circumstances where 12% or much more can be returned with very small risk, and b) they said they made $58 billion in trades, which means $58 billion in trade volume, not profit.

Update. Don't let the man get ya

https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/7915-19

“The defendants used over $28 million to make Ponzi-like payments to other pool participants, as well as spending over $18 million for unauthorized personal or business expenses such as real estate purchases in Florida, exotic vacations, sports tickets, pet supplies, loans to family members, and college and study abroad tuition. The defendants also allegedly created and issued false account statements to conceal their trading losses and misappropriation from pool participants by inflating and misrepresenting the value of the pool participants’ investments in the Oasis Pools and the Oasis Pools’ trading returns”

2p2 nailed it, per usual.

Holy crap, I totally forgot this thread even existed. Sorry to leave it hanging - it looked like everything died off.

Will try to get an update from the friend on this - I said my piece and opted to not push it further. Only see the guy a few times a year so we aren't super tight.

Gonna read through the CFTC info, I bet it's pretty entertaining.

Still *heart* ya'll.

I bolded all of the red flags. However, the biggest red flags of all is what kulk says below that I quoted and the question of why would they want your money? If making money this way was so easy they wouldn't be telling a bunch of people in fear of others figuring it out and competing with them for the trades.

Also, it is evident either you don't understand what kind of trades they are claiming to make or they don't. What does "simply use their liquidity to perform a ton of trades using "bid/ask spreads" mean and why does that equal profit? If you know the answer to this please explain as if you were explaining it to someone who has a very good understanding of trading.

If you want to scam this fish (I think it is crappy, but you may not) tell your friend to invest the min with the scammers and then side bet you 10x his investment that in the next 10 years it will be evident this is a scam and invest both of your 10x in the market. That way instead of the scammers getting all of his money you get most of it.

Very kind of you to bold all the red flags a couple years later and 2 weeks after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission charged them with fraud

can we just start a whole scam/attempted scam stories forum now?