The Expert Podcast

Over the last week, we've heard a couple of very heartbreaking stories of people who have lost their entire life savings, sometimes even more. They've borrowed money on top of their life savings to put into these online scams—these Ponzi schemes. Sometimes they're crypto frauds, and sometimes they're investment frauds. Anytime you have an investment of money that promises to give you a high rate of return, make sure that you're verifying a few things.

Make sure they're a licensed securities broker or SEC-registered securities broker. And now, don't take their word for it—make sure you verify yourself. Make sure that they are a physical office-type company in the US. They don't have a PO box. Even if they have a street address, make sure it's not the UPS store or some other type of mail drop. People are losing their entire life savings. If the rate of return is too good to be true, it's a scam, right?

Maybe what you can do if you want to test it is put some money in, wait a month, and then try to take the money out. Put a little bit of money in—an amount you can afford to lose. Put $500 in, $400 in. Wait a month. They're going to show you, "Hey, your investment doubled; now you have $1,000. Okay, let me take it out." If they give you any hard time about taking it out, it's a scam, and you've lost all your money. But at least you only lost $400; you didn't lose $400,000, which we've seen people lose hundreds of thousands of. Be aware of these scams.

Once you have lost that money, it's very, very difficult to go through the process of recovering the funds. It's a long, involved investigative process. We deal with this all the time. You have to identify the parties, you have to do an asset search, and you have to do a garnishment. There are four or five steps, and it could be excruciatingly painful. And you'll have sleepless nights because you won't know where your money is. So before you drop money into one of these scams, double- or triple-check it. If you've already put money in, you can contact us at the link below about verifying that it's a scam, checking if it's a fraud, and what you can do to try to recover some of your funds.

But these stories are heartbreaking. People have lost their life savings. They've lost their college fund for their kids. They've borrowed money from people. They've taken out second mortgages on their house. And in some cases, we had a client last week who didn't want to tell us how much was lost because they were just so devastated by it. So be very careful. You don't want to have this become a life-altering event. There are ways you can check this and verify it so you don't get scammed. But if you already have money in there, there are things you can do to try to limit the losses and maybe recover some of your investment funds.