Filed under: Real Estate, Ripoffs and Scams, Fantastic Freebies

I’ll probably get flamed for writing this, but oh well. Robert Allen has been hawking “Get rich quick” schemes involving real estate, the internet, and network marketing since before I was born. Real estate expert John T. Reed writes that Allen is “little more than a financial publicity stunt man” whose advice is “generally terrible.” Reed warns that you could “wind up in jail” following Allen’s advice.

Now Mr. Allen is “giving away” a copy of one of his books if you fill out a form. He’ll even pay the shipping! Sounds like a no-lose, right? Wrong. Read the fine print: “To receive your free book (you won’t even pay for shipping and handling), you must complete all fields below, and our consultant must confirm your mailing address during the personal phone session.”

Now color me a cynic but why is that Amazon.com will ship me $100 worth of books without confirming my mailing address, but Robert Allen needs to have one of his “consultants” call me up to make sure that I actually meant what I typed into the website. It’s almost like the free book carrot is just a ploy to get a phone number so they have the ability to try to sell you the thousand-dollar “training sessions” Allen’s known for.

I haven’t tried this offer out but here’s my advice based on what I’ve heard from others: unless you currently feel that you’re not receiving enough telemarketing calls at strange hours, don’t give Robert Allen your phone number and definitely don’t give him your money.

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Filed under: Business, Finance, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Myspace, Facebook and Twitter, the concepts are pretty much the same. You follow someone with interests that intrigues you, see what their doing, what their saying and sometimes you do what they say. Now what if they told you where to spend your money, would you? Covestor thinks so.

Covestor takes the social networking formula and applies it to the stock market in a 2 part system. The first requires members with some sort of investment background (we’ll call them experts) to build portfolios. The second has average users reviewing these members and if they like what they see, they follow them.

If these experts purchase or sell a certain stocks, users get to see that and choose if they would like to buy or sell along side their experts. Covestor is currently working on a fully automated system as well. You’ll just be able to put down a bunch of cash and the system will invest your money as your experts invest. Of course as an expert you get a percentage of the action, since people are following your advise.

So is this the next step in social networking? We already take advice on what to wear, where to go and what to eat. Why not take it a step further with having strangers tell you what to do with your money?

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Filed under: Ripoffs and Scams, Recession

That headline seems to sum up the logic of many cash-strapped consumers struggling with high gas prices. Experts say that shoplifting is up in light of the current economic slowdown, and more employees are stealing on the job too.

According to the USA Today, “All told, retail theft is estimated to cost about $40.5 billion a year. And the rest of us, already squeezed by higher gas and food prices, end up paying for it: Stores pass on much of their losses to customers in the form of higher prices.”

I certainly won’t patronize readers with a moralistic sermon on the evils of shoplifting, but I will say that I’m skeptical that most of the rise in shoplifting is a result of desperate Oliver Twist-types looking to put food on the table. The man described at the beginning of the USA Today piece — who was caught stealing cans of baby formula — also grabbed a few bags of shrimp which, let me know if I’m wrong, are a pretty high-priced source of calories. If he was caught stealing white rice and Tina’s Burritos, I might be more sympathetic.

If you really need food and are tempted to shoplift at the grocery store, try showing up before the bakery closes and asking if they can give you some day-old bagels. I know someone who did this for years and saved a lot of money, and retained more dignity than he could have stealing.

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Filed under: Ripoffs and Scams

Today I got a phone call from one of the Vice-Presidents at LifeLock. I’ve shared my opinion on LifeLock here and here. To sum it up, I think that LifeLock offers tiny value in its services. Does it provide something to its paying customers? Yes. Is it worth the money the customers pay? No.

Even worse, the company touts this $1 million guarantee that I happen to believe isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. Attorneys have claimed that the guarantee is worthless because it doesn’t guarantee to mend your credit. They say LifeLock will only repair your credit if damage to it is a result of a defect in their service. (Good luck proving a defect!)

So why did LifeLock call me? Not because they read WalletPop. But because they read my personal blog and someone realized that I was an “affiliate” of LifeLock. Yes, you read that correctly. Shortly after LifeLock came on the market, I signed up to be an affiliate for the company, hoping to market their services on my website because they seemed valuable. I was wrong. I soon decided that the services weren’t worth the fees customers were paying, and I never sold one membership. Not even to myself.

But LifeLock wanted to take the time to “educate me” on their services. Because surely I am just an ignorant know-nothing who just hasn’t taken the time to understand all that LifeLock has to offer. (Sounds strikingly similar to what we hear from multi-level marketing promoters who just think everyone opposed to their pyramid schemes is ignorant.) Heck, I even got invited to go to Phoenix and visit with Todd Davis. I declined. I don’t need to waste a day confirming what I’ve already researched.

Unless of course they want me to come visit in the dead of winter….

Tracy L. Coenen, CPA, MBA, CFE performs fraud examinations and financial investigations for her company Sequence Inc. Forensic Record-keeping, and is the author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud.

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Filed under: Deals, Raising money, Warburg Pincus, Engagements, Venture capital industry, Private equity industry, Investments, Public or private?

Most private equity firms hunt for stable companies with stable cash flows that are either cheap or inefficiently operated. These companies can then be resold for more money or taken public, or the strategy can fit into the Warren Buffett time frame of “forever.” Biotechnology has long been the realm for only public companies, but that’s changing.

Private equity firm Warburg Pincus has already made some biotech plays that seemed to be a harbinger of the trends here, and even more so when you consider foreign drug companies buying US-based biotechs on the cheap with that US Peso of a currency we’ve.

A new fund called GANIC Pharmaceuticals has been launched this week, with Warburg Pincus as the main backer. the private equity firm made an initial investment in GANIC from the Warburg Pincus Private Equity X, L.P., a $15 billion fund which shut in April. As of now, we do not have any exact launch figures for the size of the investment that was given to GANIC.

GANIC’s management is all former senior executives of MedPointe Pharmaceuticals and the company will will focus on building a substantial enterprise by acquiring revenue generating companies, portfolios, and/or products and by investing in innovation and acquiring pipeline development assets.
Continue reading at BioHealthInvestor.com to hear estimates of the size and strategies that the fund might employ.

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