Interesting one this…

some years ago I took a highly speculative punt of about £500 on some shares during the dotcom boom which duly failed to come off, leaving a set of shares worth about £50. Win some lose some..

For a few days a foreign sounding woman has called the house number about these shares but I was out. Tonight I was in. I got a long spiel about how there was a hostile takeover going on blah blah & a company wanted to buy my shares. To cut a long story short, it sounded a bit dodgy, but hey I was selling not buying, so I gave out an e-mail address (the alternative was fax,) for me to sign a note of interset to sell & also sign a confidentiality agreement. So far so good, but there was something in the way she was talking that began to smell like a script. At this point she started to mention an insurance idemnity for selling the shares which would be fully refundable and it all began to make sense, and I suggested she tried another mug.

I am, however, wondering if I ought to change my e-mail address….

scam.

were the shares bought thru or deposited in a crest/euroclear stockbroking account? if so, that broker would have sent a letter advising of a possible takeover etc.

if not, then the registrar for that company will.

stock exchange site should also indicate if there’s a possible merger/takeover for that company.

Yep. You are on the hook so now they are slowly reeling in to land the fat juicy fish.

🙄

You need to watch The Wolf of Wall Street, sounds just like a scene from the movie!

As I’ve said before, the whys and wherefores are irrelevant. If you have to ask “is it a scam?” it’s a scam.

Advance fee fraud, I’d expect. “Oh, we’ve got your money ready, it’s ten grand, but you’ll have to pay a grand ‘release fee’ first” sort of deal. EDIT – or your ‘insurance’ there, sorry, misread the OP at first.

Googling “shares insurance scam”:

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=1505967

To cut a long story short, they first said we would realise £1000 then a few calls later they said they were actually worth around £70,000. We were obviously delighted but dubious. After research on internet, we found out this company had ripped off a gentleman who had to part with £6,000 before the money was released and he sent the money and never received anything from them.

They then said that after a 10-1 stock split I owned ten times the number of shares, now worth £111,000!

All I had to do was pay a refundable insurance premium of 2% of the value.

… and many others.

Yes, the longer I thought about it, the more I realised what it was. However, what is interesting is what made me less suspicious at the time of the call was that I had had a ‘marital debate’ with my wife about the whereabouts of the worthless share certificate which I have almost certainly thrown away. Because of that, when this woman called again, I was thinking about that rather than paying full attention as to whether it was a scam. Inadvertently, Mrs INVG had provided a pyschological distraction which made me go along with this woman for far longer than I normally would have done.

Anyway the moral is. If it is a cold call, it is almost certainly not pukka. I’m still wondering if I’ve done any damage by giving them the e-mail address, but I can’t think of any way they could really use it.

Secure password on that account, of course? No “secret questions” they might now know the answer to?

No, we hadn’t got as far as personal details before I sussed it out.