These scammers are pushing for me to invest in a mobile app to rival Candy Crush.
Tens of millions of people play the mobile game Candy Crush. It's made a fortune for the inventors.
So of course scammers now see the chance to piggyback off its success.
Turning £15,000 into more than £2 million
Marcus, who cold-called me from Dubai, claimed he had a rival game that, based on “very conservative assumptions”, would turn a £15,000 stake into £218,000 by 2018. “That's the version I'm allowed to tell investors, it will really be ten times as much," he said. So that's roughly £2.2 million over the next three years.
This particular investment was actually the second 'opportunity' that was pitched to me by Marcus's bunch of scam merchants. In a previous call, his colleague Tim said his organisation published "clinical research" on "private frontier markets".
He explained: "We look into every aspect of a company's product, and when satisfied, we'll make a recommendation to our institutional clients. We do run into a fair amount of junk but the company we are about to endorse is the result of eight months of research.”
Of course, that is all rubbish. There are no institutional clients, no research, and any company only exists on paper.
Before Tim could say more, he had to check my eligibility for losing £15,000. I passed his test with flying colours on my wealth, risk tolerance and interest in technology.
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Investing in virtual gold
A week later, Tim phoned again. He told me that the “private frontier offer” from the previous conversation was out of bounds as I was retail, not an institutional client. Instead, there was a big opportunity in the gaming apps market - the world's first interactive gold mining game. As you progress through the game, you earn real gold. Supposedly you could get up to 20 grammes.
[SPOTLIGHT]This amount of gold is worth about £600 – and it would be awarded to those who had mined two million virtual tons of ore in the game. To get that far, players would have to pay out over £2,000 via in-app purchases.
That's when I was passed onto Marcus, the 'senior consultant', who claimed that this mining product was already in beta form, and set for final release in March. A media company, which had worked on a number of major banking projects for Barclays and Lloyds, would be in charge of development.
In reality the media company is a small firm in East Anglia which employs seven people. It has never worked for any bank. The claim that it owns the rights to many gaming apps is seemingly-impossible to verify - its only phone number is a mobile number which is never answered.
The deal is structured as a franchise, which means it avoids investment regulation. Marcus explained that I would purchase a 'mine' consisting of 12,500 sq ft of virtual real estate for £15,000. When a player landed on my mine, I would collect half the in-app purchase money.NUISANCE PHONE CALLS FACE CRACKDOWN
He added that Saatchi & Saatchi had already developed a huge campaign around a gold rush scenario.
That was news to the mega ad agency which told me it had never heard of this game, is not involved with marketing games in general, and is now consulting its lawyers.
Marcus promised to send details. I am still waiting. But I did ask why he was in Dubai.
“The weather's better and I pay no tax,” he replied.
That's the only true thing he or Tim said.
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More on scams:
Nuisance phone calls face crackdown
The many scams of 'Derek Jones'