Before addressing the scam, I want to address the legitimate use of a shell company. Also, you should be advised the OTC Markets will identify Shell vs. Shell Risk companies when you look at their ticker page; e.g. ADHG - Ando Holdings Ltd. is a Risk but BFCH - BitFrontier Capital Holdings, Inc. is not. Neither of these conditions on the OTC is saying they are a scam.

A typical legitimate use of a Shell Corporation would be to obtain early seed funding by investors with enough wealth to speculate on a whim. You are buying a promise of something at such a low price that if you were wrong you wouldn't care. It's akin to regular people buying a few lottery tickets and not minding when they become worthless. The promise is that eventually, the ownership of shares in the shell company will translate into real ownership of shares in the real company which the shell was created for. To be more abstract though, Speculators looking to diversify their investment portfolio just want to put money into a genre of a company (assume medical), so Wall Street types will make a shell company with an abstract name that sounds medical and investors will park money in that. Those same Wall Street type people will now seek a non-public medical company that has some promise and try to sell their shell company to them in order to finish the attachment. To clean up later, the listing agencies will get a notification of a ticker symbol and/or company name change and Voila! the shell company becomes a real company.

However, suppose you were a nefarious person on Wall Street and you wanted to get a new Lamborghini but you basically didn't have enough because you spent yourself out on mansions and yachts. You could launch a shell company with the following plan to fleece the general public.

In the past, you would get an accomplice but with technology being what it is, you might be able to go it alone. One thing that makes a company look good is if it's price steadily increases over time. A shell company—unlike a high volume publicly traded real company—has its share price determined by very few people who know about it. With this shell, you and your partner can buy and sell your shares to each other on the open market. Nobody will be paying attention to your trades because it's just a shell company. Every morning you lay out your plans of how you are going to price the trades throughout the day and what volumes you are going to trade at to look just like an ordinary good company when charted. Each day is about the same as the last but a small amount of price rise is apparent in the chart.

After you and your partner build up some history, you begin loud-talking about the company in public places. This makes people overhearing you think they are getting private information that they can capitalize on. You also start to hype the breakthrough the company has made in technology or medicine through some public means like a shell website for the shell company. When people start searching for more on the new company they overheard about in a bar or restaurant, they find confirming evidence that its gonna be a great thing.

Human nature makes those people promote the finding to friends and relatives because a secret is something you tell one person at a time. The hype starts to grow like a virus and real investors begin to seek out this fictional company to put their real money into it.

You and your partner start to see volume numbers in the trades that aren't your own and you know that other people are buying into your scam. At this point, you can increase the hype for the company and keep the internal trades going to make sure the price is rising. As real people buy your shares, the money they paid is basically yours now. You just keep running the scam until you've sold enough of the shares to buy the Lamborghini, you've sold off all the shares to the general public, or something goes wrong with the ruse. As long as you can avoid the FCC, SEC and other law enforcement agencies as well as any civil charges that are going to look for you, you get to keep all the money.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-09-06-fi-1614-story.html

https://www.timesofisrael.com/alleged-israeli-financial-scammer-arrested-in-bulgaria/

https://newrepublic.com/article/132600/us-shell-companies-just-common-panamanian-ones

It would be surprising if you were to be a victim of this scam in the future, but knowing how it works is important.

From the point of view of the person being scammed, you get a message that says somebody can predict price changes of stocks and that they do it for a fee, but you are getting a free sample; this letter/eMail/SMS includes a ticker symbol and an up or down prediction for this week. You discover that the prediction was correct. A week later you get another similar message, the ticker symbol might be different but it will have a prediction. Again you will discover that the prediction was right! Amazing? This pattern will go on for many weeks and you will be convinced that paying for the service will grant you access to this insiders club where you can make a fortune and fix all the problems in your life.

The way it works, in reality, is the scammer sends out a million messages, but half say the stock ticker will go up and the other half say it will go down. Some buy after the first week; they are done. Some got the wrong prediction so they get no more messages. On week two about 500,000 people get messages where 250,000 are told it will go up and the rest that it will go down. Of the 250,000 that got two correct predictions in a row some will buy the service and they are out. Another 250,000 never get the message again. The scammer runs this trick until the halfling runs out, but along the way, lots of people got perfect predictions not knowing that there was another much bigger group getting non-perfect predictions.

The length of the string of perfect predictions feels like the scammer is really good, but it's just the random chance that the scammed person was sent the correct prediction over and over again.

A #school's #Principal, #Superintendent, and #Board / #Committee are basically reproductive organs of societies status quo.

They come from within a culture expressly for the purpose of reproducing that culture. A School Board (elected by a tiny minority of society who are in-the-know), are typically made up of the local royalty; wealthy people who control industry and decide what type of workforce they need to crank out of our #PublicSchool's. The Superintendents serve at the pleasure of the school board, and the Super has all the hiring decisions on the Principals, so the type of person is easy to control. Principals secondarily serve at the pleasure of the school board and make all the hiring/firing decisions for the people entrusted to take care of delivering education to our children. If you or your children notice an authoritarian bent to your designated public school, it's there by design, not by accident.

The gap between an ordinary #American's experience in public schools and the time they can really judge what the hell happened while they were there is about 10 to 20 years. While you are in the institution, you don't have the life experience to judge your own experience. The few memories you have of that 13 years of your life are focused on the interactive drama with your peers, not on the tragically unhealthy system designed to make you into dutiful clock workers who do what they're told by middle managers after you graduate.

I have personally been in the armed services and was a certified math teacher for NYS schools K-12. I got my certificate from a University instead of a College. The main difference is I was steeped in the ideals of education and the possibilities for the learner gaining and benefiting from the advanced knowledge, whereas the typical college trained teacher is gifted with the Machiavellian rules of power in the school. As I worked in our public schools I couldn't help noticing that they had an uncanny resemblance to military boot camp and the command structure. I would rate military organizations slightly better based on personal experience. I've run into unethical practices in both that made me shudder, but never expected it in schools; rampant incompetence, rule one is cover your ass, rule two is screw-your-coworkers, lots of #MeToo shit going on, psychological abuse of the students, enforcement of removing freedoms from students that they have on paper.

Their's even a bit of prison culture running around schools. That favoritism of the big violent types that the guards can control happens where the favorite jock (soon to be a rapist) gets favoritism by faculty and staff in order to be pointed to giving beat-downs on subversive types in the school (artists and creative thinkers). High-school click's and prison gangs are about the same thing, just with less physical violence in school.

We would think that it would be common to hear about this in the news sometime, right? Well, the few places I worked had gag orders as a condition of employment; you aren't allowed to say anything bad about the school system to anybody at any time or you will be terminated. Sure, you could talk about it after you are fired... ...if you want to flush that college degree down the toilet and never work as a teacher again.

If you learned about the history of how American schools changed from little prairie houses to the massive factories we have now, you would see that it's all about wealthy industries controlling costs. The first pitch to create schools was that they could turn those shiftless farmers into clock-workers who could calculate correctly, as well as read, write & follow orders. American Public Schools had the same moral foundation as a horse ranch that captures wild horses and breaks them so as to hitch them to carts, covered wagons, and cannons.

I have had many fond memories of teachers who were doing the right thing within a terrible system but they are a small portion of my total educational history in America. I have many uplifting experiences with teachers who my children learned from too, but those are not part of the system by design; those are good people that get through tenure before they start doing the morally right thing for their students.

We are coming up on the end of the #BetsyDeVos era. Her tenure is like a super-hurricane, earthquake, volcano directed at the public schools to make them worse than they are, weakening the negotiating position of most future working Americans, strengthening the position of private industries control over the curriculum, as well as religious influence so as to have a better bit & bridle on the students thoughts. I can only hope that true progressives will attain power in the coming election and have an epic rebuilding effort after the damages done during the #Trump administrations reign of terror.

Selecting a specific financial security isn't entirely straightforward. It's a bit more of a dance; give and take but you lead.

Asking somebody what's the best stock to own is a lot like asking what's the best vehicle to own. I might recommend the 1980's Lotus Turbo Esprit. You may want a vehicle to get to Quimper France from Miami Florida. Knowing that I would suggest sailing Yachts, a private jet, or perhaps booking a cruise depending on your personality and sense of adventure. If instead, you tell me you do delivery of small packages in a dense urban area, I would point you to Cannondale bikes with some off-road suspension features.

So for an advisor to begin to tell you what you should buy, first, you have to decide what you want to do with it.

If you are a thrill-junkie with money to lose and an expectation to win big, you will want stocks that have a normally undesirable high standard deviation of their daily returns.

If you are a stable middle-class worker with a family that has grown a bit too big for you to put all your children through college with budgeted savings alone, you should probably be building a portfolio of blue-chip type stocks that are changing from their growth stage to their income stage. This will give you low-risk moderate long term gains and low taxed dividends at the same time. It's a safe way to achieve your financial needs for future tuition requirements.

It's not easy to really know what you want out of an investment, especially if you are new to investing, because you can't really say what you want till you know what your options are. This is why I said it was a bit like a dance. Still, despite it being difficult you should ask yourself, why you are reading this? What are your innermost secret desires for owning stocks, bonds or other stores of capital? When would you want to go in? When would you want to come out? What growth hopes do you have? What risk tolerance you have? Would you contemplate suicide if an investment dropped to half of its value in a day because of a lawsuit against the company? If your growth goal happened early, would you come out early or "let it ride"? Would you be using it as a better savings account putting in and taking out regularly? How much do you need to get through a year without being forced to sell your investments low because a recession struck while you are in the market?

Be methodical and write down your ideas about investing. Come back and review your notes about every week or so. Talk about your ideas to family and friends and also experts in the field. See what type of conflicting advice you get and then try to get resolution on what is right from unbiased sources.

About the choice for the Forum's profile image.

It's a well known story in finance courses offered in colleges and universities that a challenge was posed where a drunken monkey throwing darts at the stock listings pages of the Wall Street Journal could do better at building a Portfolio than the top paid money managers in the industry. Depending on when you decide to stop the trials is the main determining factor for who's winning. It's about a coin toss between the record of a random selection and the top managers.

The main reason for this comical outcome is commonly referred to as the Efficient-Market Hypothesis; in brief, about 1,000 analysts (minimum) per stock study that stock daily as their only job, so if anything could change the pricing of that company thousands of people would immediately react to it so the price a ticker is listed at is correct at all times. The Efficient-Market Hypothesis can't prevent catastrophic changes to a company, like unforeseen health side effects from their product, failing health of a CEO, legislative changes that alter a market, and so on. It also can't stop big positive changes to a security in a short period of time.

I tried it once with a friend of mine who worked at UBS. I made a spreadsheet that was putting together randomly selected characters of lengths 1 to 5 and the first 12 that were real companies were mine. He laughed so hard at my choices. For 2 months he was winning the competition. For multiple years after that I was ahead, and by a large margin. He got sick of talking about it.

If you currently have a person managing your money and they don't have a legal "Fiduciary Duty" to you as their client, then you cant really trust their motives for suggesting what you put your money into. Generally, the house they work for has a set of products that they want your Financial Advisor to push onto you, and your personal financial advisor may believe they are the best choices, but chances are they aren't. Because of this information gap, you should learn something about picking stocks. Stock Picking is something that most people can do safely and successfully with a reasonable amount of learning and effort.

Also, some people like to say that the Stock Market is just gambling. This is a fallacious statement for a couple reasons. First, in gambling you are generally expecting to loose everything invested or get a big return at every moment; with a stock you are expecting to have a small gain over time and if it's down you can stay in and watch it go back up again or pull out with a small loss. Secondly, in gambling, you are putting your hopes in a truly random variable that is heartless to both the bettor and the house; in the stock market you're putting your hopes in a collection of human beings who are engaged in an existential battle for survival and they care about what their investors think. That's what the normal state is. Sure the sensational stories of debauchery like Enron, Madoff, and other criminal activities are perversions of the system, but just in the USA theirs about 9,000 securities you can invest in and in the last decade their have been about 5 catastrophically dishonest companies. Planes crash, buses hit pedestrians, peanuts kill children and so on, but most of us persevere.