Saw this article in The  Sunday Times today and feel sad for those ignorant investors who lose thousands or millions of hard earned money into all sorts of investment scams. These kinds of INVESTMENT SCAMS will continue to exit due to human nature. Human can never learn from the history generation after generations due to the greed and laziness in human nature. I share my personal thoughts here and hopefully prevent more people falling into these kinds of investment scams in future.

Root Causes

• People tends to believe in all sorts of GET RICH QUICK program and attracted to all type of FREE seminars with FREE meals with FREE gifts. Wake up! There is NO free lunch in this world! The organizer will figure a way to get the money back from you (a lot more!) by luring you to attend those FREE talks. This is business, not charity, someone has to foot the bill for providing those free stuffs (booking venue, food catering, purchasing of gifts, pay salary for the staffs, etc)!
• People also tends to believe the $$$ can fall from the sky by listening “experts” tips without doing all the hard works and investing oneself in the Financial Education. Wake up! Your own family members not even willing to provide you $$ without any conditions, why should the “experts” provide you FREE tips to make you rich?

Preventive Measures

• Invest in yourself FIRST on the Financial Education before investing any money into any instrument (Gold, Bond, Stocks, Commodity, Derivative, etc). Make sure you understand the RISKS before any investment. To those people who loves to invest in Gold, there are alternate ways to invest gold safely and cheaply (you don’t need to pay high commission and the Bid/Ask slippage). You can also be 100% in control over your Gold Investment. Please learn how to invest in Gold ETF. Check out the Gold ETF information here.
• Learn how to control your greed. Always remind yourself there is NO FREE LUNCH in investing. You have to do homework and have good money management to be successful.

I apologize for being very blunt. Just hope my little post can help some people from losing more money to those investment scams. Just a very tiny contribution to create awareness to the society.

Original post from My Stocks Investing by Marubozu.