Scammers, Scammers, Scammers & more scammers

It is truly sad the state of our business economy... these days you have to spend 95% of your time sorting through spam, garbage & scammers to get to the 5% legitimate business. Think of it this way... if I gave you a 10lb bucket of random seeds and then told you to only pull out the wild flower seeds... It is tedious, and even to an experienced person it is still very difficult to filter out the right stuff. Sometimes you are wrong.. and down the road it leaves you with some bad results. If you accidentally get a watermelon seed, your garden would definitly look wrong. And when you get those wrongs seeds or scammers, you find yourself with a lot of wasted time, energy & money. Sometimes you get it right and you get the desired result or make good money.

I have spent the better part of my last year chasing & sorting through scammers, con artists, & groups trying to pull a ponzi scheme. Last year I spent a lot of time trying to break my business into commercial financing at a larger level (we do a little here & there), but it seemed like EVERY private financing source was only out for the deposits. Sure there are legitimate ones out there taking deposits but I had only a very small portion of those transactions ever turn into anything. I had a few clients that lost deposits because they lied to me, I had a few clients lose deposits because the lending group was stupid. But I spent thousands of hours on conference calls & on the phone simply wasting time with scammers & con artists.

This year I have been working on BULK REO's (foreclosure real estate) with similar results. I have seen 4 orders for $500 Million with bogus proof of funds letters just in the last 4 weeks! I have come across bogus sellers (supposedly selling Gov't REO's). I even had a bogus seller that when it came full circle the buyer was the same group as the seller! Then just yesterday, I had a conference call that was supposedly with a buyer, guess what 8 people showed up on the phone all demanding how much they were going to make on a $2Billion purchase transaction. I told them all they would have to share .125% each, guess what they all got mad & I had to leave the call. All they were worried about was making that one pie in the sky transaction fly. The sad part is if the $2Billion was real even at an .125% of a percent they each would have made $2.5 million! I doubt any of these guys even have $2,500 in their bank account! Where does it end?

People are wondering why there is so much legislation & rules being added to the mortgage and real estate industry & why no one trusts anyone anymore the simple answer is greed. If many of these lying businessmen & scammers would spend half as much time & ingenuity doing legitimate business as they do scamming people they would be a lot wealthier than they are now. Not to mention they wouldn't need to sleep with a gun under their pillow.

Needless to say, the garden of the US economy is a weird mess right now and businesses are failing left & right because they financially cannot support chasing the 5% legitimate business. I am not sure what the solution is but call me naive,telling the truth and being fair to people is a good start to repairing the losses.