I remember getting a cold call in 2014 from (supposedly) an investment company in Hong Kong. I was curious to hear what kind of pitch they had for someone like me living in Finland.
They claimed to have access to a block of NVidia stock available at a discount to the market price (I think it was around 10-15% off) and they needed investor funds immediately to buy the whole block. The minimum investment was $10k. When I sounded interested, my call was moved to a different young man who had a much more aggressive tone. That's where I hung up.
After the call, I remember thinking: "This is actually a good investment idea. I should buy some NVDA, but not from these weirdos in Hong Kong."
— Dear reader, did I buy the stock then? Of course not. Looks like NVDA is up about 260x since that call. (Insane. I had to double-check that.)
Imagine if someone actually sent $10k to this cold-calling Hong Kong company and just forgot about it. Now that $10k would be worth 2.6 million dollars. You see NVidia in the news and get excited about cashing out to buy a mansion... You call their phone in Hong Kong. "This number has been disconnected." No trace online of the investment advisor who got your $10k. That would sting far worse than just realizing early on that you'd been scammed.
You would send them 10K USD and you could forget about 10K forever. What a great opportunity. I'm not even sure the were from Hong Kong, probably some scam from mainland China.
> This is a very common active Bitcoin "investment" scam today.
Are you saying that now that BlackRock's CEO is endorsing it, El Savlador's president is buying it as reserve for the country and Trump promising to use Bitcoin as a strategic reserve, it could go 260x and that, hence, if we get such a scammy phone call we should hung up and open an account on Coinbase (a HN unicorn btw) to buy Bitcoins?
They claimed to have access to a block of NVidia stock available at a discount to the market price (I think it was around 10-15% off) and they needed investor funds immediately to buy the whole block. The minimum investment was $10k. When I sounded interested, my call was moved to a different young man who had a much more aggressive tone. That's where I hung up.
After the call, I remember thinking: "This is actually a good investment idea. I should buy some NVDA, but not from these weirdos in Hong Kong."
— Dear reader, did I buy the stock then? Of course not. Looks like NVDA is up about 260x since that call. (Insane. I had to double-check that.)
Imagine if someone actually sent $10k to this cold-calling Hong Kong company and just forgot about it. Now that $10k would be worth 2.6 million dollars. You see NVidia in the news and get excited about cashing out to buy a mansion... You call their phone in Hong Kong. "This number has been disconnected." No trace online of the investment advisor who got your $10k. That would sting far worse than just realizing early on that you'd been scammed.