The Trinidad and To­ba­go Se­cu­ri­ties and Ex­change Com­mis­sion (TTSEC) is warn­ing the pub­lic about emerg­ing in­vest­ment scam trends and pat­terns in T&T

In a re­lease on Tues­day, the TTSEC stat­ed it has ob­served scam­mers de­vel­op­ing new tac­tics to de­fraud in­di­vid­u­als.

The re­lease said,"Based on its mar­ket sur­veil­lance ac­tiv­i­ties, the TTSEC ad­vis­es the pub­lic to re­main vig­i­lant for the fol­low­ing signs, char­ac­ter­is­tics, and evolv­ing tac­tics used by scam­mers such as fake pro­files and false promis­es made on so­cial me­dia plat­forms

The TTSE said," On their plat­forms, the scam­mers may ad­ver­tise an at­trac­tive in­vest­ment op­por­tu­ni­ty to en­tice po­ten­tial in­vestors to in­vest. The ad­ver­tise­ment may make promis­es of un­re­al­is­ti­cal­ly high re­turns with­in a short pe­ri­od of time. For ex­am­ple: “Earn $30,150 on a $2,000 in­vest­ment with­in 2 hours”."

Oth­er tac­tics the TTSEC not­ed were, " En­gage­ment via Telegram/What­sApp: Af­ter send­ing a mes­sage to the ad­ver­tised page, you will be asked to pro­vide your con­tact num­ber, and the con­ver­sa­tion will be moved to What­sApp or Telegram. In­di­vid­u­als claim­ing to be “rep­re­sen­ta­tives” of the com­pa­ny will en­gage with you on the na­ture of the in­vest­ment and give as­sur­ances of guar­an­teed prof­its or re­turns."

The Com­mis­sion said the rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the com­pa­ny would pro­vide bank de­tails, ask­ing for a de­posit of funds as soon as pos­si­ble while oth­ers would claim" there are no fees in­volved and that the funds can be with­drawn with­in 24 hours or some oth­er de­fined pe­ri­od."

How­ev­er, the re­lease not­ed, there may be with­draw­al de­lays or fees that ex­ceed $1,000 when an at­tempt is made to re­move mon­ey from the ac­count.

The fraud­sters, the TTSEC said would at­tempt to cre­ate an "il­lu­sion of le­git­i­ma­cy" via "a link to the en­ti­ty’s in­vest­ment plat­form (usu­al­ly a web­site which shows var­i­ous cryp­tocur­ren­cy in­vest­ments), along with lo­gin cre­den­tials for an ac­count made in the in­vestor’s name. Once logged in, you may see a huge bal­ance com­pared to the funds ini­tial­ly in­vest­ed, which may sig­ni­fy that you have earned a sig­nif­i­cant re­turn, ei­ther in TT dol­lars or Unit­ed States Dol­lars. "

The TTSE has not­ed that Ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence (AI) tech­nol­o­gy has made it eas­i­er for scam­mers to pro­duce of­fi­cial type look­ing doc­u­ments.

The re­lease stat­ed, "The scam­mer may pro­duce doc­u­ments that pur­port­ed­ly ap­pear to come from le­git­i­mate fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions or of­fi­cial gov­ern­ment or­ga­ni­za­tions, such as the Fed­er­al Re­serve Bank. Al­ways ver­i­fy with the named en­ti­ty pri­or to trans­act­ing. Us­ing AI tech­nol­o­gy, the scam­mer may al­so present as high-rank­ing pub­lic fig­ures by uti­liz­ing pho­tos and so­cial me­dia ac­counts that ap­pear le­git­i­mate. These are usu­al­ly fake and in­tend­ed to im­per­son­ate."

Oth­er tac­tics not­ed were re­quests for sen­si­tive in­for­ma­tion, use of third-par­ty mon­ey trans­fers, funds be­ing cir­cu­lat­ed by mul­ti­ple ac­counts, ad­di­tion­al fees be­ing im­posed af­ter with­drawals and per­sis­tent calls to may pay­ments as well as fake tes­ti­mo­ni­als from in­vestors.