Boiler Room Scam

Boiler Room Scam are quite frequent and have been going on for a really long time. In the 1990s, the boiler room was quite popular, as they used their aggressive tactics to lure people into their scam and make them invest as much as they could in one go.

In the 1990s, many people were aware of the scams, and they spread like wildfire, defrauding millions of people through their marketing tactics and enticing millions through them.

In this scam, they were made to invest in the shares promoted by the fraudster, and the owner of the boiler room or the affiliated person would have purchased a large amount of shares. By aggressively promoting the shares in the market, they pump and dump the shares and gain all the profit. Let’s understand more about boiler rooms and how they operate.

What is a boiler room?

Boiler rooms are nothing but a call center where salespeople have a list of investors or potential investors whom they target and try to sell the shares to. The salespeople put immense pressure on the investors by mentioning only positives about the stocks and making them feel “fear of missing out.”

They use “opportunities like this happen once in a lifetime” and other phrases to make people fall for the scams. The term boiler room is used because of the aggressive tactics used by the salespeople in this heavily crowded place under immense pressure. Most of these boiler rooms are located in the basement.

The salesperson from the boiler room often makes investors overspend on shares or securities that have quite low values. These high-pressure telemarketers got the tag of Boiler rooms in the 1990s, but after that, they are still in the industry with various means. Now, they send emails, text messages, and even voicemails to initiate contact.

Phone calls are still active, but they have adapted various other methods to target investors, and surprisingly, all of their methods work smoothly. Many people do invest in their scheme, and investors lose millions of dollars in a year in such a scam.

How to Spot boiler room scams?

Boiler Room frauds share a lot of similarities with other investment scams. If you are aware of the scam and think straight, they can still pressure you to buy shares, but you have to resist and ignore them. Still, there are many investors who get convinced by their scheme and start investing. Salespeople from boiler rooms use many tactics to lure investors; listed below are some of the methods used by them.

1. Immediate Action
   When a salesperson gets in contact with you, they will try their best to make you buy the securities, and they will randomly throw words like “once in a lifetime opportunity”, “buy now for a better future,” and more. Their ultimate goal is to make you spend your money on worthless stocks, and the commission behind the sale motivates them.
   In between, they will never let you develop second thoughts and will pressure you to make a quick decision, so you can’t even consult or contact a professional for advice.
2. Aggressive Sales tactics
   The telecaller really put immense pressure on the investor, and they put in 100% effort so the investor could never back off from the investment. If the investor denies the investment, they will use other tactics, like indirectly questioning the intelligence of the person rejecting such a gold opportunity.
   Such things offend the investors and make them invest in the shares. But if the investors seem half interested, the caller will call on a regular basis, and each time they will try to convince the investors.
3. False Hopes and fake promises
   Fraudsters in boiler room operations promise higher returns with low to no risk at all, but this can’t be true. Naturally, the higher the returns you get, the higher the risks you will have with the investment. People even fall for their fake promises and end up losing all of their investments.
   These fake firms will never provide any legit return proof, whereas legitimate firms will clarify the risk of the investment or explain the tax implications of an investment.
4. Unusual transaction
   When you agree to invest, you will expect to get the bank details of the company or some legit source where you can process the transactions and get the stocks. But fraudsters have their own ways to scam you without leaving any trace of their fraud.
   They can use an overnight courier service to collect the funds or get picked up by a cab or other service, which will be available at your doorstep. Their goal is clear, to collect the funds as quickly as possible before the investors change their minds.

Examples of Boiler room scams

The unethical sales tactics used by the fraudster caused huge losses in the 1990s, and boiler rooms gained popularity during that period. Many books, articles, and news channels covered the scam, and along with that, many movies were made about it. But over time, they have adapted to the changes and developed their techniques; here are some recent examples.

• Pump and Dump with Penny Stocks
  If you are not familiar with the term penny stocks, let me explain for you, the companies whose stock value is less than $5 per share are termed penny stocks. Most boiler rooms try to sell penny stocks, as they are cheap and any investor can buy their shares without any share limit.
  Generally, fraudsters buy a huge chunk of shares of such companies at a low price, and with the help of boiler rooms, they get buyers who start investing in the penny stock, which in turn pumps up the price of the stock. Later, after a week or so, the fraudster will sell all the shares he or she owns, called as dumping, which crashes the value of the shares in no time, causing a loss of millions for other investors.
• Software
  There were cases in the boiler room scam where con artists used to sell sports betting software. This scam was caught in 2015 in Queensland, Australia. The scammer reached out to the investors and lured them in with false promises of getting $80,000 per year as a return. While they paid local police for the cover-up.

Conclusion

Winding up the article, I hope you have learned enough about boiler room scams through this article that it will help you ignore such enticing offers in the future. Con artists will never stop reaching their so-called potential investors, which they quote as “sucker lists.” If you receive messages or calls for investment and have any suspicions about the scam, you can directly reach out to law enforcement for further guidance.

Victims who are all suffering because of the boiler room scams can reach out to Zecoup to get proper assistance in fund recovery.

FAQ