Prime Bank & Prime Note Scams pg. 4
My Personal Experience with one of these Hucksters
About 8 or 9 months ago, a colleague of mine called me at work virtually breathless, telling me that I had to get to a secure phone and talk to this ‘guy’, apparently a ‘friend’ of my colleague. This was the ‘big one’ I was told—‘just hear him out’.
Very quickly, I knew it was a ‘Prime’ scam. Not wanting to be rude to my colleague’s friend and informing him that he was lower than a snakes’ belly, I choose instead to do two things:
1. I went to sec.gov and looked up Prime Note Fraud—by the way, the huckster did an excellent job of following the script—Almost everything he said matched what the SEC website said would happen.
2. I threw out some Wall Street lingo i.e. “Sounds great, what’s the CUSIP number of the issue?” And send me the paper work—(Apparently, this opportunity was such a secret that I was to turn over $10,000,000.00 with absolutely no documentation whatsoever because a ‘lawyer’ was involved and he (or she) would serve as ‘escrow Agent’ so my money would be safe. (Unbeknownst to ‘Leroy the Lowlife, I don’t yet have an extra $10 million sitting in my sock drawer—it is currently tied up in a pyramid scheme—just kidding.
After the call ended, I called back my colleague and informed him that I had just prevented him from losing a considerable amount of money (he doesn’t have $10 million either but he was being let into the inner sanctum as one of the ‘paymasters’, apparently, paymasters make more with a smaller investment)
What I found most amazing was that my colleague initially seemed upset that I was ‘negative’ about the prospects of this opportunity. It was then that I realized that when the greed button has been pushed enough times, rational thinking gives way to an irrational need for greed.
All scams have two things in common which should tip you off:
1. You are being promised outsized returns
2. There is little or no risk.
These two sentences or variations of these two sentences should immediately result in you hanging up the phone or heading to the door.
Richard Gandon is the Managing Director of The Financial Learning Network. His 'Understanding the Stock Market" course was made into a CD-ROM and is in use in more that 50,000 classrooms nationwide.
Every year since 1998, Richard has teamed up with a fifth grade class in Georgia to teach them about the stock market online.
Richard has more than 20 years of financial services industry experience including as a broker, trader, licensing trainer and managed both a sales group and a Historical Equity & Index Research group at Standard & Poor's. 
