Unsolicited high offer for share holding
Discussion
This is all rather third hand, but my mother-in-law recently had a phone call from "the USA" wherein a company who is claiming to be involved in a hostile takeover of a UK company in which she owns a few hundred shares, are offering her 7.5x the current market price of her holding. Another wrinkle is that she didn't actually know the size of her holding in this company, as her husband hadn't kept good records before he died. But there was some evidence that he had at least at one time owned some shares in it.
Anyway, this all set alarm bells ringing when the GLW told me about it... fortunately my m-i-l has got her son dealing with it, and he's very sensible, but what are the thoughts on this ? Are they about to be told that they have to pay some sort of fee to qualify for this offer, something else scammy, or could it even be legit ?
When I get that type of phone call I'm delighted to have someone who understands shares and things like that as I've been wondering what I should invest in ....so I ask them to explain a brilliant moneymaking scheme I've heard a lot about but don't understand - something to do with "boiler rooms" - sadly they tend to put the phone down and they've never told me the answer.
mrmr96 said:
98elise said:
Why would they ring a shareholder direct when they could just buy the shares on the open market.
If they're trying for a hostile takeover then they need to buy up a certain percentage.Well, fairly predictably the scam is she has to pay them £5k as "indemnity" against their guaranteed offer price for her shares of £46K. They sent her quite an impressive looking contract full of legal stuff, which all looks quite convincing when you read it. She won't be taking up their kind offer. But you can certainly see how some people would fall for it.
The company making the offer is called Barrington Group with an address on Madison Ave. There is now a warning about this firm on the FSA website as well.
The company making the offer is called Barrington Group with an address on Madison Ave. There is now a warning about this firm on the FSA website as well.
outnumbered said:
Well, fairly predictably the scam is she has to pay them £5k as "indemnity" against their guaranteed offer price for her shares of £46K.
That makes no sense whatsoever. How can they possibly justify asking for money? (I know it's scam, but I'm intrigued as to what they claimed the reason for the payment was.)mrmr96 said:
That makes no sense whatsoever. How can they possibly justify asking for money? (I know it's scam, but I'm intrigued as to what they claimed the reason for the payment was.)
The documentation appears to say it's a sort of "good faith" payment to ensure that you will go ahead and sell your shares to them. But yes, it obviously makes no sense.98elise said:
Why would they ring a shareholder direct when they could just buy the shares on the open market.
Because that would involve an exchange. Get a f
kwit to sign the transfer docs and post it to you with the cert while convincing them about extended settlement and you get their stock for free. This is why they stopped permitting the purchase of share registers. They were the best mugs lists money could buy.
Get the register for something like Dragon Oil and you've got a list to spank that you can extract millions from.
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