4 - No telephone number Again, why would anyone contemplate doing business with a financial firm that doesn't publish a telephone number on its website Also, if a suspect firm does list a telephone number make sure you call it a few times Does a receptionist answer it with the company's name 'Good morning, Acme brokers how can I help you' or do you get an answerphone or worse, an answerphone that never announces the name of the company you've actually called 5 - A Website That Tells You A Lot About Nothing If you surf on some of these Regulation S sites you’ll soon see that most of them tell you a lot about pretty much nothing They drone on about Regulation S type shares, Institutions, 'global clients' etc but in reality they talk very little about the company in question, who it is, where it's located, how it conducts and operates its business etc You'll also see that for many of the sites the copy is extremely disjointed and seems to indicate that its been collated from a number of different sources then just bolted together, hardly the professionalism one would expect from a financial company .

How A Potential Regulation-S Scam Might Work

Simple, it would likely use the 'advance fee' strategy where greed will play the dominant role and hook. It might work something like this - An investor who was scammed out of some money some months ago will be contacted saying that the Regulation S shares he thought were perhaps worthless are in fact worth say $25,000 This is because some 'global high flying businessman' is trying to make a bid for the firm and is willing to pay a significant premium for all the shares BUT, due to some sort of legal technicality the shares cannot be 'released' (often called the 'legend) until some sort of 'bond' is paid by the investor Remember, that the person on the other end of the phone will be an extremely skilful salesman and we admit that many times their stories are almost perfect The salesman might ask for say $5,000 so the shares 'can be released' etc Many will fall for this (especially the ones who fell for the first scam) because they'll view that 'investing' $5,000 to make $25,000 (the bond of course will be 'refundable'!) is an excellent investment But more often than not the investor will find himself out of pocket again......