As it is Friday this reminds of a guy I new in North Wales who fell for the ostrich scam some thirty years ago.
The idea was you bought a young ostrich and it was kept on a farm in Europe (I believe in France) and one paid an annual subscription for it to be fed and looked after then you made a profit when the adut was sold for meat.
There was never any proft because the young ostriches were overpriced and many did not exist anyway.
Eventually newspapers started soundng alarms so the guy I knew took his truck with a horse trailer and drove off to the ostrich farm to demand his ostrich back.
He was a big guy so he got it back OK but the farm owner recognised an idiot when he met one. So he said ostriches could not live alone or they would pine and die so he bought a second one at the inflated price.
I used to see them running around on his small holding but I haven’t been in the area for years so I don’t know what happened in the end.
I made a bit of money on one of those. Signed up to get a free fraction of a barrel. Deposited and withdrew some money to get the free whiskey and then ignored it for a few years until the free amount got big enough to be worth closing the account and getting the cash out.
Isn’t it the same approach that people do (or used to do) with Wine, Stamps & time share holiday apartments? … fraud or not, despite being ‘real assets’, the value is also depending on market fashion and trends…
Buying tropical wood comes to mind as another venue/scheme. You had to wait 10-20 years hoping for a payout but that hardly ever came. This was big among German doctors and lawyers IIRC because of some tax advantage or exemption.
Former SNB president Leutwiler was involved in an attempt to regrow forests in deforested tropical areas, the company Precious Woods was exchange listed for about a decade. It still exists and is operative but the huge success that was promised never came to pass. Sadly, no surprise there.
He did not know himself
Nobody was interested in buying them to butcher the meat, the ideal age for slaughtering ostriches for meat is generally considered to be 12 to 14 months so waiting for them to grow up was anyway a non-starter.
Maybe he stll has them, they can live to 70 years.
An epic tale of organised crime, multi-million pound fraud, and the victims left in its wake. Reporter Sam Poling investigates the world of cask investment to find the bandits exploiting Scotland’s most famous export - whisky.