Some scams are more innovative than others and then there are scammers who pull off a scam planing on the idea of offering investments that are get rich quick schemes and offer a much higher return on capital to the gullible investors.
A deep dive into the Falcon Invoice Discounting scam
some scams are out there in plain sight and yet people fail to see the trap and simply walk into them. They are lured by a dubious high return on their investments.
One such scam is the one run by the Falcon Invoice Discounting, which has recently come to the fore.
In this scam a lot of money was collected from the public at large by making unrealistic promises to them.
How was the scam structured?
Falkan Invoice Discounting ran a P2P money lending operation which offered a high rate of return to its investors.
For this they had devised 2 investment schemes: the 45 day investment plan and the 180 day investment plan.
In these investment schemes they offered a high rate of return to the investors ranging anywhere from 15% to 22$ as the return on the investment.
The dubious investment scheme got started in 2021 and ran for a couple of years.
In this process a total of 1700 crore Indian rupees were taken from investors. In all, over 7000 investors got into the trap of this dubious investment scheme.
How could the dubious business run for so long?
They used the initially collected funds to partly pay the early investors. In this manner out of the 1700 Crore rupees collected almost 50% that is 850 crore rupees were used to pay back in part the early investors and gain their confidence.
Falcons fabricated a false investment strategy
The scamming business claimed that they were investing the money in companies such as Amazon and Britannia and as a result could offer such high returns to their investors.
As a result as much as 850 crores of investor funds are stuck with the fraud company with little or no hope for recovery.
What should be the red flags to look out for?
Look for the obvious red flags such as when this business offered a 15% return on capital for a 45 day investment plan it was a red flag that should have cautioned the investors.
Similarly a 22% return for investing for a period of 180 days is a very high and unrealistic return which the dubious company offered and should have cautioned the investors who instead blindfolded walked into the trap and lost their hard earned money.
How did the scam offer gain so much traction?
The scammers ran ads on social media promoting their high return offers and as a result over 7000 people got trapped in the offer.
It is only when payments started getting defaulted that investors lodged complaints with the police and the law enforcement body came into action.
The police have arrested two people in the connection however by this time the maasterming and the founder of the scam one Amardeep Kumar went absconding and is still at large.
It has come to light that shell companies and crypto were used to siphon money.