Investment seminars are much more common in the US than Britain. Research done there showed that about eighty per cent of Americans over sixty had received invitations to investment seminars with sixty per cent having received six or more in a three-year period. Around a quarter of those approached attended one or more seminars with about one in ten attendees actually going ahead and buying whatever was being sold. But now the number of companies offering free investment seminars in the UK seems to be on the rise and there have already been several cases where people have been duped out of large sums of money, sometimes several hundred thousand pounds

Investment seminars often masquerade as being educational, claiming they will teach attendees how to grow their money or how to avoid investing mistakes or how to plan for a comfortable retirement. But they are really all about aggressive selling and most will use similar tricks to hustle attendees into parting with their money. The majority claim to be revealing secrets that most people don’t know, promise high returns with little to no risk and use high-pressure sales techniques to extract money from attendees. One of the most exciting I found promised to reveal ‘the forbidden investment secrets that could give 17,000 per cent’ returns. Most will try to frighten people into immediate action at the seminar by suggesting that there is a rapidly closing window of opportunity – typically presenters will use well-worn manipulative phrases like: ‘there are only a few places/properties left’, ‘I can offer a discount to the first five people who sign up’, ‘today is your chance to get in on the ground floor’ and ‘if you don’t act quickly, too many people will get in on the act and the price will shoot up’. The last thing these salespeople or hucksters want is for their audience to take the time to think about what is being pushed and discuss it with friends, family or advisers. They want our money, they want a lot of it and they want it fast, there and then.

There seem to be three main types of investment seminars – those trying to sell investments and investment management services, those hoping to lure people onto expensive courses and/or buy books and CDs and those which are outright scams designed to steal attendees’ money.

The most common seminars are aimed at enticing attendees into putting their savings into insurance products or annuities which pay the seller high commissions of anywhere from five to ten per cent. Or else they are flogging more questionable investment schemes like properties, land or exotic foreign bonds where the sellers’ cut can be much higher. One expert in the US who made a living selling financial planning services wrote that he usually set a target of drawing in about $1 million in investors’ money from each seminar, earning him $50,000 to $100,000 in fees per seminar. In an article giving advice to other financial sellers he revealed a few of his tricks for drumming up interest and convincing attendees to buy. Amongst other things he proposed that they should use punchy titles for their seminars like 6 financial mistakes to avoid in retirement or How to avoid running out of money; should discredit attendees’ current financial advisers; and should ‘show them you are an impartial adviser and want them to do the best thing for their situation’. Studies done by US regulators found that most seminars made ‘misleading or exaggerated claims’. As one investigator remarked, ‘every rock that we turned over seemed to have a bug or worm crawling out underneath.’

Each year hundreds of thousands of people attend seminars that will supposedly teach them how to make money, usually by trading in shares, property or foreign exchange. The companies are quite clever with their advertising. They don’t promise to make their customers rich. Instead they will claim something like, ‘This is not a get-rich-quick scheme. It is designed for people who want to leave full time employment and trade for a living and who are serious about sustainable wealth creation.’

These sessions normally last for about two hours and are actually aimed at persuading attendees to sign up on one- to two-day courses often costing several thousand dollars or pounds. Though with some companies that’s just the start of a longer process of taking money from their customers – many of those who do go on the courses find that they learn very little as these courses are just further hard-sell sessions designed to make them pay thousands more for further supposedly ‘advanced training’ plus various computer systems, CDs and books that should allow them to invest or trade successfully.

The four seminars I attended all followed pretty much the same pattern and consisted of the presenter taking the audience through four main parts – telling a bit about their own personal story, revealing a few trading secrets, kicking people into action and trying to close the sale by getting a few attendees to sign up immediately while they’re still hot to trot at the thought of all the money they’re about to make.

When talking about why they were running the seminar, each of presenters claimed to have been in a successful career in a large company, but to have felt unhappy at being a salary slave making money for some big organisation rather than for themselves. They then told us how they had been liberated when they found out about whatever course they’re selling – shares, foreign exchange or property. All four said that they didn’t work for the company offering the training, but had been ‘invited’ to come along and tell us about how they went on the course and learnt to make so much money that they could give up their day jobs and spend most of their time either becoming wealthier or else travelling round the world and pursuing their hobbies. Later, when I checked the presenters’ Facebook pages, I found that their real life stories were not quite the same as those used in their presentations.

Next came about thirty minutes giving us glimpses into the wonderful secrets of the infallible investing or trading systems we would learn if we went on the courses offered by the companies the presenters said they didn’t work for. However, I found out afterwards that all the information was available for free from the Internet and from firms operating shares and foreign exchange trading sites.

One of the key messages in this section of the presentations was that nine out of ten people lost money because they just followed the herd. But that once we went on the courses they were selling and we discovered the secrets of successful investing or trading, we could make money at the expense of the suckers who would keep on losing.

A large part of all four seminars was given over to the ‘do it now’ section. In this, the presenter turned from financial expert into a motivational speaker and spent the time trying to goad us into action, asking things like, ‘how much do you want this?’ and ‘why haven’t you done this?’ and ‘every day hesitating is a day missed’ and ‘you must make the change’ and ‘this is only for people who can make decisions, if you can’t make decisions, you can leave whenever you want, that’s ok’. In three of the four seminars we were played a short video ostensibly showing people just like us who had taken the courses and were now making lots of money. One of these supposedly successful students was clever enough not to mention what exactly he was trading, so his videoed testimonial was used twice by one company – both in a seminar on shares trading and in another selling a foreign exchange trading course.

Each seminar ended with a fairly pushy attempt to get us to sign up on the spot rather than going away and thinking about it. One offered a package of training, books, CDs and coaching worth £2,995 plus VAT for just £1,997 plus VAT. Another came with an even more amazing deal – a whole training package worth £6,235 plus VAT, coincidentally also for just £1,997 plus VAT. We were told the dates of the next few courses and informed that there were only two or three places left on each course. I reckon that three or four people in each session did sign up on the spot in order to take advantage of these apparently spectacular deals. What I found most worrying was that those who did register for the courses looked like the people in the audience who could least afford it. As one US regulator commented, ‘They are preying on the weakest people financially. You see a disproportionate number of minorities and immigrants.’

Some seminars are apparently deliberate scams where the presenters convince attendees to invest in completely fraudulent schemes. Work done in the US suggested that just over one in ten investment seminars were out and out theft. It seems incredible that someone would attend such a seminar and then willingly hand over five- and six-figures sums to a complete stranger to be invested in off-plan, new-build properties in the UK and Spain or in promissory notes for Turkish investments or in building a new holiday resort in Brazil. But people apparently do and when they do, they lose an awful lot of money. One group of scammers in the US managed to grab $20 million before they were rumbled and in Britain a property investment firm took at least £11 million off people who thought they were investing rather than just being robbed. When investors started complaining about their losses, the owners claimed they had done nothing wrong and said they would defend themselves aggressively against any legal actions brought by those whose savings had skilfully performed an impressive disappearing trick.