Some advive please.

I have received an unsolicited call from a US company regarding some shares I own. They represent a company wanting to buy them out & they are after my shares.

They have made a verbal offer that does sound too good to be true but they have asked me to sign a Non disclosure agreement.

I am no legalite but I can not see anything in the NDA other than the saying I can not discuss details of the different companies with anyone else.

AM I OK to sign the NDA as I can not see anything else in the document other than the NDA info ?

If you want to send the NDA over to me I can have a quick look at it. I would suggest that you seek your own legal advice, however I can point out if there is anything “unusual” in the NDA.

NDA’s are quite common when entities start picking off companies or groups/types of companies. It stops other shareholders being made aware and trying to hold the buying company to ransom.

If OMITN is around today, he’ll have a better knowledge of NDA’s in this context I think.

Forget the ND. The offer is most likely to good to be true.

It’s almost certainly to stop news leaking into the market and driving the price up.

It’s almost certainly to stop news leaking into the market and driving the price up.

MadBill, is the target company a PLC (or publicly listed in another jurisdiction)?

Getting every member in a PLC to sign an NDA to stop the market finding out is like pissing into a very strong wind 🙂

If the price is unusually high, it could be rumour mongering (i.e. the buying company manipulating the market).

Peterfile,

The shares being sought are aan AIM listed company.

The price they are mentioning is 20 times the current price !!!

It certainly sounds too good to be true
at 20 times the current price but then I don’t want to miss out

The words “bull” and sh-t” spring to mind.

It sounds like scam.

That’s not how these things work.

EDIT: Have a look at this MoneySavingExpert thread on boiler rooms – the thread on Regus exposes how this “reverse” scam works.

The shares being sought are aan AIM listed company.

The price they are mentioning is 20 times the current price !!!

AIM listed + 20 times current price = market manipulation.

The AIM is particularly prone to manipulation, they could have at least come up with a more realistic price!

Scam.

This is a good read if you want to understand how rumours affect markets

Are the shares in a football club?

Ah, that’s another good one Donald.

There’s been a few of those, where you have to pay £120 (or similar amount) in up front fees. It seems worthwhile because you’re getting such a great price per share, but then of course once you pay the fee you never hear from them again.

Presumably for most though, once you are asked to pay anything up front, the alarm bells would be deafening.

Oh, and the NDA is likely to contain some sort of indemnity and selling fee where you pay to sell your shares.

Scam. Avoid.

There’s a conventional market – to the extent there’s a market at all – for AIM traded shares. If you want to sell, use that. Otherwise, hold tight and wait for them to make the full list.

Could be a slightly more eloborate “pump and dump” (i’ve always liked that phrase, reminds me of many interactions with the oppostite sex in my youth). i.e. rather than just spamming people senselessly about how a penny stock is about to “explode” they leave it to members to post the name of the stock all over internet forums, making it sound more credible but non-members suddenly thinking “oooh, i’ll have some of that”. NDA might just have been thrown in to make it sound more official/legitimate.

More likely it’s just a scam to either pick up your bank details or get you to pay out some form of up front cash.

cheers guys.

Interesting reading. I was well aware of those daft foreign boiler room scams such as ourmanupnorth refers to but I could not suss how this might work.

Very enlightening – Thank you all.

I guess the new bike will have to wait a while.

If you’d said you needed to make an upfront payment that would have been a definite indicator.

Really depressing reading that, OMITN – just what a bunch of shits there are, that set up schemes to rob people like that – I’d prefer to be mugged in a back alley.

That said though, I think any time someone says “Almost too good to be true” you need to remove the word almost from it and think again. 20x value says pulling a fast one in a way 2x wouldn’t.