Almost every week we receive emails from people who have been caught out in a scam. There are so many rogues out there using charm and manipulation on desperate people looking for better returns. Tammy is one such victim and she kindly, and bravely, shared her story with us in the hope that it acts as a warning to those who still do not believe that when it seems too good to be true, it really is.

“I really never thought it would happen to me, I thought I was fairly financially astute. How wrong I was,” Tammy says about her experience of being fleeced to the tune of hundreds of thousands of rands in a Ponzi scheme.

As with most schemes, it all started with a referral from a family member. “My mother one day started telling me how a very good family friend of ours was making a lot of money off an investment.”

Both Tammy and her mother had money invested in unit trusts with Allan Gray, but the returns the friend was getting were so much better. Too good to be true – as it turned out.

The family friend in question had a neighbour who claimed to be a futures trader. “Our friend had given this trader almost a million rand and had been receiving monthly payouts of around 19% a year on the investment – that was just in interest not the capital. We all thought, ‘what a find!’ and invited him to our home. He sat in my lounge in my humble apartment and met my kids. He was informed that I was giving him some of my life’s savings. He understood what this R150 000 meant to me,” says Tammy. Her mother had told so many of her friends about this great ‘Futures Trader’ that collectively they had invested around R2.5 million.

It took time to receive any investment documentation and Tammy and the other investors were told to leave the investment to grow. They were also told that if they needed any of the money soon he could not guarantee where the market would be and they could incur losses. This is fairly normal for any market-related investment as markets can fall over the short term, but it did not tie in with his story of providing a 19% per annum income return as initially suggested.

Although Tammy did receive some money from time to time, she started to feel uneasy. But then after two years of no returns they started to suspect something was seriously wrong. “The rands began to drop and we realised we could not get hold of this guy. He never returned our calls, he would then return the calls but be in a meeting so couldn’t talk. Then we would email him with notices wanting our money back.”

From time to time he would give them a small carrot in the form of a small cash payment. “We would cling to this gesture of goodwill because we did not want to fully acknowledge that we had given our precious savings without any proof or finding out that this man was who he said he was. We went blindly on trust. It was such a wonderful feeling to trust, but so awful to be betrayed.”

Family friend as bait

Tammy also had to acknowledge the role of their good family friend. He was at the top of the scheme and had been the bait, with his initial payouts, which had caught the rest of them because they trusted him.

“Once we realised the brutal truth, our money was gone. Then began the frantic attempts to recover it, throwing good money after bad, paying lawyers to investigate which all cost more than it was worth.”

Only at this stage did Tammy do the research she should have done in the beginning. She contacted the Financial Services Board (FSB) and discovered the trader was not registered. All she had was his ID number which was of no use. The bank they had deposited the money into was not interested that their client had committed fraud. “The fraud division would not even return my calls,” says Tammy.

Eventually Tammy realised she had to write the money off. She was at least in a position where she was still relatively young and still earning an income, but the same was not true for other people in the group. “Some had invested all their life’s savings. What kind of heartless person could do this?”

Her last act was to report the man to the police. It appeared a hopeless task. “I had already phoned all the relevant crime divisions for white-collar crimes in the country, but no-one knew the correct process or procedure to lay a charge against this criminal.”

Tammy then went to her local police station, where it was a similar story: no-one seemed to understand the crime that had taken place. “I must have stood in the police station for an hour trying to explain my situation. Eventually they gave up on me and I went home.”

Fortunately, in a conversation with a community leader Tammy was given the name of a senior officer at the police station who advised her to get the whole group of investors together to lay a charge under once case number. He told her that the larger the sum defrauded, the more likely it would be viewed as a fraud case and investigated at a higher level.

Tammy heard nothing for about 18 months, then out of the blue she received a call from an advocate who told her the man had been prosecuted and had reached a settlement. The agreement was that if the complainants were willing to accept the terms they would each receive R100 000 followed by monthly amounts until the debts were repaid. If the payments failed at any stage, the offender would be sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. So far he has kept to his agreement.

“What a journey this was, but my message to anyone who is scammed, is don’t just give up. Report the matter. Justice may take its time, but it does work.”

Tammy has been extraordinarily lucky ‒ partly due to her tenacity. Very few victims ever follow through or ever see their money again.

How to spot a scam

• They are not widely advertised on mass media platforms. They rely mostly on word-of-mouth by usually using a few people as “bait”. The early investors receive “too good to be true” returns and then convince other people to join.
• The returns promised are always well above what you would expect from a normal investment but when the investment returns do not materalise, there is always some clause in the documents that says “these are projected and not guaranteed” even though it was sold as a guaranteed or low-risk investment.
• They are not registered with the Financial Services Board or the South African Reserve Bank, and are not authorised financial services providers. Promoters or brokers are not registered with the Financial Services Board as qualified brokers.
• The initiators are not accountable to anybody and can disappear at anytime.
• The schemes do not have a corporate organisational structure (CEO, directors).
• They do not provide any real proof of investment of your money (ie. investment certificate); sometimes they will issue you with a piece of paper with a logo, but this means very little.
• They may offer a guarantee to get your money back if you are not happy with the investment. This guarantee is nothing but words on a piece of paper. Anyone can promise you a “guarantee” – it means absolutely nothing unless there is a bank underwriting it.

The difference between a pyramid scheme and a Ponzi scheme

In both a pyramid scheme and a Ponzi scheme, investors receive returns from money invested by new investors. The difference is that with a Ponzi scheme, such as in Tammy’s case, the investors believe that there is an underlying investment or business generating the income.

In the case of a pyramid scheme, investors are aware that money is coming directly from new investors – such as the MMM scheme.