How can I report pump and dump scams?
Start with your local police department then move on to these sites. Fill out the United States Postal Service fraud complaint form  http://ehome.uspis.gov/fcsexternal/ Contact your State Attorneys General. Your state Attorney General or local office of consumer protection is also listed in the government pages of your telephone book Write to the Federal Trade Commission: spam@uce.gov If you are aware of a securities (e.g., stocks) scam, insider trading, etc., you will want to contact the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission). http://www.consumerfraudreporting.org/SEC.php
"A friend since July online and big business talks and trust/money forwards.  Usually a question ""is this a scam or legitimate?"" is hard to answer since obviously scams are modelled after legitimate stories (or they'd easily fail). If there were bookmakers for ""scam or legitimate"", this one would easily gather odds of 10000:1.  The only plausible reason for this to be legitimate would be to defraud the scam-or-legitimate bookmakers. At any rate, Exxon is a large company and has to obey labor laws.  They cannot set up operations in a manner where their workers may not have access to their salary for prolonged times without easy remedy. Drop communications immediately, don't open them, don't read them.  They hook you with emotional investment.  They will redouble efforts if it appears you are slipping out of their reach.  Explanations will become more plausible, more pressing, more emotionally charged.  You are a big promising fish and they won't let you swim off without a serious struggle to rehook you. Hand your communication so far to law enforcement.  That may help with not having to figure this out on your own." Patrick Byrne (CEO of Overstock.com) ran a somewhat interesting website awhile back called 'Deep Capture' which focused heavily on naked short selling and bear raids. He was called all sorts of names and many 'serious' journalist types brushed his allegations off.   His basic argument was that a cabal of hedge funds would simultaneously naked short a specific equity and then a coordinated group of journalists and message board jockeys would disparage the company as loudly and publicly as possible, driving the price down. Naked shorting is supposed to be illegal since you can hold the types of positions like in the linked article about Citigroup where the number of shares sold short actually exceeds the number of shares in existence.  The group he named was essentially a who's who of hedge funds and fraudsters and included many names of prominent politically active 'reformed' criminals from the S&amp;L days on Wall St. I can't remember how the cards fell, but the scheme allegedly involved Michael Milliken, Sam Antar (from Crazy Eddie's Fraud), Gary Weiss, Jim Cramer, etc etc.   It was a fascinating story.   Byrne actually followed through with several lawsuits (one of which was settled after a Rocker Partners paid Byrne $5 million dollars to settle).   The 'Deep Capture' site is down, but I [found a decent article](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/01/wikipedia_and_naked_shorting/print.html) that sums up some of the shenanigans, including a journalist sock-puppeting to edit Wikipedia, repeatedly denying it, being IP-traced to inside the DTCC building (the Wall St. entity responsible for clearing trades, including naked shorts). Pump-and-dump scams are indeed very real, but the scale of a single scam isn't anywhere near the type of heist you see in movies like Trading Places. Usually, the scammer will buy a few hundred dollars of a penny stock for some obscure small business, then they'll spam every address they have with advice that this business is about to announce a huge breakthrough that will make it the next Microsoft. A few dozen people bite, buy up a few thousand shares each (remember the shares are trading for pennies), then when the rise in demand pushes up the price enough for the scammer to make a decent buck, he cashes out, the price falls based on the resulting glut of stock, and the victims lose their money. Thus a few red flags shake out that would-be investors should be wary of: Meh... how about telling us how they actually run scams?  What to watch out for?  Some real info.  What's here is, mostly, obvious top level stuff.  What I want is the dirt.  Real details.  Real content.  Come on, give it to us. "Coming from someone who has worked a in the account servicing department of an actual bank in the US, other answers are right, this is probably a scam, the phone number on the letter is probably ringing to a fraudulent call center (these are very well managed and sound professional), and you must independently locate and dial the true contact number to US Bank. NOW. Tell them what happened. Reporting is critical. Securing your money is critical. Every piece of information you provided ""the bank"" when you called needs to be changed or worked around. Account numbers, passwords, usernames, card numbers get changed. Tax ID numbers get de-prioritized as an authentication mechanism even if the government won't change them. The true bank probably won't transfer you to the branch. If the front-line call center says they will, ask the person on the phone what the branch can do that they cannot. Information is your friend. They will probably transfer you to a special department that handles these reports. Apparently Union Bank's call center transfers you to the branch then has the branch make this transfer. Maybe their front-line call center team is empowered to handle it like I was. Either way, plug your phone in; if the call takes less than 5 minutes they didn't actually do everything. 5 to 8 minutes per department is more likely, plus hold time. There's a lot of forms they're filling out. What if that office is closed because of time differences? Go online and ask for an ATM limit increase. Start doing cash advances at local banks if your card allows it. Just get that money out of that account before it's in a fraudsters account. Keep receipts, even if the machine declines the transaction. Either way, get cash on hand while you wait for a new debit card and checks for the new account you're going to open. What if this was fraud, you draw your US Bank account down to zero $800 at a time, and you don't close it or change passwords? Is it over? No. Then your account WILL get closed, and you will owe EVERYTHING that the fraudsters rack up (these charges can put your account terrifyingly far in the negative) from this point forward. This is called ""participation in a scam"" in your depository agreement, because you fell victim to it, didn't report, and the info used was voluntarily given. You will also lose any of your money that they spend. What if US Bank really is closing your account? Then they owe you every penny you had in it. (Minus any fees allowed in the depository agreement). This closure can happen several days after the date on the warning, so being able to withdraw doesn't mean you're safe. Banks usually ship an official check shipped to the last known address they had for you. Why would a bank within the United States close my account when it's not below the minimum balance? Probably because your non-resident alien registration from when you were in school has expired and federal law prohibits them from doing business with you now. These need renewed at least every three years. Renewing federally is not enough; the bank must be aware of the updated expiration date. How do I find out why my account is being closed? You ask the real US Bank. They might find that it's not being closed. Good news! Follow the scam reporting procedure, open a new account (with US Bank if you want, or elsewhere) and close the old one. If it IS being closed by the bank, they'll tell you why, and they'll tell you what your next options are. Ask what can be done. Other commenters are right that bitcoin activity may have flagged it. That activity might actually be against your depository agreement. Or it set off a detection system. Or many other reasons. The bank who services your account is the only place that knows for sure. If I offer them $500 per year will they likely keep the account opened? Otherwise I got to go to singapore open another account Legitimate financial institutions in the United States don't work this way. If there is a legal problem with your tax status in the US, money to the bank won't solve it. Let's call the folks you've talked to ""FraudBank"" and the real USBank ""RealBank,"" because until RealBank confirms, we have no reason to believe that the letter is real.  FraudBank will ask for money. Don't give it. Don't give them any further information. Gather up as much information from them as possible instead. Where to send it, for example. Then report that to RealBank. RealBank won't have a way to charge $500/year to you only. If they offer a type of account to everyone that costs $500, ask for the ""Truth in Savings Act disclosures."" Banks are legally required to provide these upon request. Then read them. Don't put or keep your money anywhere you don't understand." A couple ways, but its not a guarantee.  You have to have special charts. Instead of each tick being 1 min, 5 min, or whatever, it is a set number of trades. Say 2000. Since retail investors only buy and sell in small amounts, there will be small volume per tick. An institutional investor, however, would have a much much higher trade lot size, even if using an algo. Thus, large volume spikes in such a chart would signal institutional activity over retail. Similarly, daily charts showing average trade size can help you pick out when institutional activity is highest, as they have much larger trade sizes. You could also learn how the algos work and look for evidence one is being used. ie every time price hits VWAP a large sell order goes through would indicate an institutional investor is selling, especially if it happens multiple times in a row. Sap just developed a fraud detection module for their ERP suite in conjuction with EY. It offers live fraud scanning so you can stop a flagged transaction before a transfer is carried out.  I saw a presentation an it looks pretty powerfull although it is only in the early stages. "If you must play with these scammers, be sure to open a new account, at a new bank, in order to supply ""personal banking information"".  If it does pan out and they give you some money, you can always move it to your real bank account. Be sure to deposit into the new account no more than you're willing to lose to them." "The Indian regulator (SEBI) has banned trading in 300 shell companies that it views as being ""Shady"", including VB Industries. According to Money Control (.com): all these shady companies have started to rally and there was a complaint to SEBI that investors are getting SMSs from various brokerage firms to invest in them This suggests evidence of ""pump and dump"" style stock promotion.  On the plus side, the SEBI will permit trading in these securities once a month : Trading in these securities shall be permitted once a month (First Monday of the month). Further, any upward price movement in these securities shall not be permitted beyond the last traded price and additional surveillance deposit of 200 percent of trade value shall be collected form the Buyers which shall be retained with Exchanges for a period of five months. This will give you an opportunity to exit your position, however, finding a buyer may be a problem and because of the severe restrictions placed on trading, any bid prices in the market are going to be a fraction of the last trade price." "For this to work, those who control the dilution must also control their salaries because the only way for them to be paid off when it's the corporation itself selling is to gain access to the proceeds. When a corporation sells newly issued equity, the corporation itself owns the money.  To at least have the appearance of propriety, the scammers must be paid those proceeds.  Both actions imply that the board is captured by the scammers. There are many corporations that seem to do this even with persistently large market capitalizations. The key difference between this and pump-and-dump is that its a fraudulent group of investors selling in this case instead of the corporation itself. A detailed simple example Corporations are mandated by law to be little oligarchies; although, ""republic"" is now becoming more appropriate with all of the new shareholder rights.  A corporation is controlled at root by the board of directors who are elected by the shareholders.  The board has no direct operational control, as that is left to the ""king"", the CEO; however, the board does control what everyone wants access to: the money. Board members have all sorts of legal qualitative mandates on how to behave, and they've functioned fairly decently efficiently over the long run, but there are definitely some bad apples. Boards are somewhat intransigent since it's difficult to hold board elections, and usually only specific board members are put up for election by a shareholder vote, so a bad one has the potential to really get stuck in there.  Once a bad one is in there, they don't care because they know it will be tough to get them out, so they run roughshod over the company's purse. Only the board can take action on major funding such as the CEO's operating budget, board compensation, financing, investment, etc, some with shareholder approval, some without.  The corporation itself owns all of those assets, but the board controls them. In this example, they scheme with most likely the top executive, but a rubber stamp top executive could allow a lower rung to scheme with the board, but the board is always constant until the law is changed. Because there's no honor amongst thieves, the board votes which can require some combination of executive and shareholder approval are taken very close together: sell shares, increase salaries to key executive schemers, increase board compensation.  The trusting shareholders believe this is in the best interests of the company at large so go along. So the money flows from existing & new shareholders to the corporation now controlled by a malicious board and then finally to the necessary malicious executive and the vital malicious board." "As others have commented, this is almost certainly a Ponzi scheme. What will happen is that they will report to you that you are earning fantastic returns.  This will encourage you to pour more money into the scheme in the belief that you are making huge profits. The problems will start to occur when you ask for your money.  You won't receive any money and by the time you realise you have been scammed, the site operators will have vanish with all of the ""suckers"" money." "Given that such activities are criminal and the people committing them have to hide them from the law, it's very unlikely that an investor could detect them, let alone one from a different country. The only things that can realistically help is to keep in mind the adage ""If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is"", and to stick to relatively large companies, since they have more auditing requirements and fraud is much harder to hide at scale (but not impossible, see Enron). Edit: and, of course, diversify. This kind of thing is rare, and not systematic, so diversification is a very good protection." I have prepared a report on scam's like this. I'd be happy to deliver a copy of the report to your home. Just give me your address and mail me the keys to your house and I'll drop by and leave it in your home. Oh, and tell me a time when you won't be home, so I won't bother you when I come by. It might also be helpful if you tell me if you have any cash, jewelry, or other valuables in the house and where you keep them, so I can give you advice on security measures. :-) "Accept that the money's gone.  It could, as others have mentioned, been a lot more. Learn. Make sure your son (and you!) have learned the lesson (at least try to get something out of the $650).  The world isn't always a nice place unfortunately.  Don't wire money to strangers - use an escrow service or paypal or similar.  As the saying goes: ""Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me"". Report it to the authorities. Does have the advantage of the domestic rather than foreign bank account used.  The scammer might have closed it by now, but there should be some paper tail.  I imagine the id required for opening a bank account in the US is as strict as it is most places these days.  They may have used fake Id, but that's not your problem. Assuming contact was made over the internet, bearing in mind IANAL (or American), this could be a crime of Wire Fraud, in which case I believe it's a case for the FBI rather than your local police.  The phone calls your son is still receiving could also be construed as attempted extortion and if across state lines could also come under federal jurisdiction. The FBI have a better chance of catching such a scammer, generally having more chance of knowing one end of a computer from the other compared to a local beat cop.  If other victims have also contacted the authorities, it will probably be taken more seriously. Give as much information as you can.  Not just the bank account details, but all communication, exact time of phone calls, etc. The cops may say there's nothing they can do as it's a civil matter (breach of contract) rather than a criminal one. In which case you have the (probably expensive) option of going the civil route as described by Harper above. Inform Others. Assuming initial contact with the scammer was made through a website or forum or similar.  I imagine this must be a niche area for hand made toys.  Post your experience to warn other potential victims.  Inform the site owner - they may ban the scammers account where applicable. Stop the calls. Block the number.  If the number's being withheld, contact the provider - they should have a policy regarding harassment and be able to block it their end.  If the calls keep coming, your son will need to change his number. Don’t let it get to you. You may have warm cosy fantasies of removing the guys kneecaps with a 2x4.  Don't however dwell on the b*stard for too long and let it get under your skin.  You will have to let it go." Yes this is a huge security loophole and many banks will do nothing to refund if you are scammed.  For example for business accounts some Wells Fargo branches say you must notify within 24 hours of any check withdrawal or the loss is yours.  Basically banks don't care - they are a monopoly system and you are stuck with them.  When the losses and complaints get too great they will eventually implement the European system of electronic transfers - but the banks don't want to be bothered with that expense yet.   Sure you can use paypal - another overpriced monopoly - or much better try Dwolla or bitcoin.