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Bertram Earl Jones ran a Ponzi scheme for decades in Quebec that cost his victims, including members of his own family, a reported $51.3 million Canadian.
In 1979 Jones began his own investment advising business. At the time he did not register with any securities regulator and he never would. Jones would go about offering investment advice and claim to sell securities unregistered for 30 years.
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Illegal distributions refer to the sale of securities, usually shares, that have not complied with securities laws around registration, trading and/or disclosure.
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The Bre-X Minerals Ltd. scandal has all the trappings of a Hollywood story. A fledging minerals company residing in the penny stocks reportedly strikes the largest gold claim in history tucked away in the jungles of Borneo. The gold claim was worth billions and sent Bre’X’s stock value soaring from pennies to hundreds of dollars. In the end it all turned to be fool’s gold, resulting in one the largest stocks scams and cases of mining fraud in Canadian history.
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Last year during March we ran an extensive series on investment fraud, outlining common types of investment frauds, the red flags to watch for, and what to do if you think you are a victim of investment fraud. With March being Fraud Prevention Month, it’s the perfect time to deliver a quick review of investment fraud while also pointing you back to some of our older posts.
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March is Fraud Prevention Month, and the Nova Scotia Securities Commission is reminding investors to do their due diligence when investing.
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Bernard Lawrence Madoff perpetrated the largest financial fraud in American History. It is estimated he bilked his 4,800 clients out of $64.8 billion.
Madoff got into the investment industry in 1960 when he founded Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. Over the next four decades before his criminal deeds came to light, he was a respected adviser, businessman and philanthropist, and even held the position of chairman with the NASDAQ for many years.
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During Fraud Prevention Month in March we will be taking a closer look at some forms of market misconduct. Not all forms of market misconduct are frauds, but many do, or can be used to commit some kind of investment fraud.
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Arguably the most infamous fraudster in history, everyone knows the name Charles Ponzi. They may know the name, but that doesn’t mean they know the story behind the man who swindled thousands of people out of $20 million in the 1920s.
Originally born Carlo Pietro Giovanni Guglielmo Tebaldo Ponzi in Italy in 1882, Charles Ponzi, an Italian immigrant, lived in Boston in 1919 when he stumbled upon a money-making investment scheme: international reply coupons.
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March is Fraud Prevention Month! All month long we will be sharing special content on investment fraud. This will include our regular Question of the Week posts every Wednesday, as well as a special series on Friday, we’re calling Fraudster Fridays. Every Friday we’ll be sharing the story of a famous investment fraud, how they scammed their victims and how you can hopefully avoid falling prey to the next big scam artist.
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In last week’s question of the week blog post we mentioned the term accredited investor. That left some of our readers scratching their heads, because they didn’t know what an accredited investor was.