Platinum Financial Services whose executive director Andrew Wood provides weekly advice in the Bangkok Post has been put on a Securities Exchange of Thailand’s Investor Alert list.
Wood’s last column in the Bangkok Post was to advise expatriate Brits how to invest their pensions and save tax.
The best advice he could give them is not to invest in Platinum Financial Services.
The author here does not need to tell British expats in Bangkok not to invest in PFS or with certain other local financial advisers plying their trade in the bars of the capital and elsewhere – their victims are well documented.
But it is annoying when journalists know they are allowing a dubious company to promote itself in their newspaper and still do nothing about it. They really should know better even though they may get a free dinner once a year.
The column may come at no cost to the newspaper, but people who have been led to invest with PFS and its associated companies have suffered disastrously.
For more on Andrew Wood’s history see the links below.
Meanwhile please wake up Bangkok Post. There’s no such thing as running a ‘free’ column or of course a free dinner/lunch. Everything comes at a price. And it is your readers who suffer! Even your colleagues on your sister paper the South China Morning Post have noticed something is amiss.
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| A Flying Sporran Advisory |
Andrew Drummond, aka, the Flying Sporran is executive director of Andrew-Drummond.com. His articles cover the complete A-Z of scammers, shysters, the foreign criminal fraternity in SE Asia and much much more. You can reach him through the contact button on this website, or if you wish to avoid those Google annoyances by emailing andrew at andrew-drummond dot com.
Unlicensed, Unregulated, Unscrupulous, the lot of em.
Thailand based IFAs are not to be trusted and not to be invested through. These parasites only want the commissions and don't care if the hapless expat's life savings are at risk or even all gone for ever! Even from the SEC, there's no recourse to any type of compensation or action when their highly recommended bubble bursts.
I often wonder how much self perspective these guys have. Are they aware they are devious shit talkers or do they actually believe their own bullshit? One thing for sure is they lack a conscious as they'll readily sell financial advice that loses a person's money as long as there is something in it for themselves. Just looking at the photos of these guys confirms I wouldn't trust them to walk my dog let alone manage my money.
Up here in CM, the ungodly seem to have won hands down with the removal of Teak Door's long-running thread on the local goings-on. There's now no way for those affected to give out info via posts or PMs as to the whereabouts or activities of those responsible for the total loss across the expat community of six-figure sums.
Typical. Andrew, you're in the UK now – fancy a challenge in the general area of Lancashire?
Great article – you make excellent points. From the gibberish Andrew Leppard used to write to the more recent thinly-disguised sales pitches by Andrew Wood, the Bangkok Post has run "free articles" from this one single group for well over a decade. All this for a free meal from time-to-time? It will be interesting to see what the Bangkok Post does now.
Perhaps an expose on links between the crooks in Thailand's expat " Financial Services " and Thailand's most popular expat forum.
Is it even possible to get a pint of the black stuff in Thailand without washing the money of Thailand's expat crooks?
The DeVere Group occupies office space in Bitexco, prime office space in the HCMC central business district. They don't seem to me bad people out and about, but I personally wouldn't take their advice or use their services. I actually wonder who their clients are as retired expats are not common in Vietnam and the expat business community is relatively small. I very much doubt rich Vietnamese would deal with this kind of investment.
The DeVere group is a well-known 'factory', using poorly skilled and poorly trained staff to hunt 'sales' with no plans of returning the income before a signed 25 year plan is up. It is unknown how much money will be left by then. They not only prey on the ignorant on the sales side but also on the staff-side, where the 80%-turnover rate is due to them abusing anyone but the 'high sellers', that have to be ruthless to be it.
tanmedia and libertarianinthaiand – What does deVere have to do with this story? Platinum Financial Services (PFS International) has many names: Business Class Asia, Barclay Spencer, Barclay Corrigan, etc. PFS International has affiliates with more names such as the London Nominee Football Fund. But deVere isn't one of their names.
I take your point. It's not a good reflection of the industry in general when a story about PFS makes a reader think of DeVere. In the West, I think that banks are moving into the FA space (most definitely in NZ) but Asia is obviously fertile hunting ground to find the gullible and naive. Makes me wonder if these people should be here in the first place (the gullible and naive).
Well De Vere is also on the alert list and I have written about these people before
Thinking of DeVere, or any of the other shysters and their scam investment products, is a great warning for anyone contemplating taking financial advice from Thailand based IFAs.
They are all tarred with the same brush. In fact they should all be tarred and feathered and strung up outside the SEC, then jailed.
And I definitely agreed with the opinions stated above reference deVere. I suppose we should be thankful that the Bangkok Post has not been publishing a weekly column exclusively by deVere for the past decade. And one day I would like to know the real reason they published Mr. Wood's column exclusively for years. A free meal here and there just doesn't seem to explain that degree of unethical journalism.