Is this a boiler room?
Question by Kevin K: Is this a boiler room?
I was just offered a job by a company whose office are in Times Square in Sukhumvit. They said that they are a recruitment company based in the UK for corporations like Shell, O2, BP, Rolls Royce and Merrill Lynch ect. They said that I wold be cold-calling consumers in Europe to “persuade” them to use their financial services, and we wold not be selling anything.
Now they part that makes me start to wonder if its a boiler room, is that they did not tell me the name of the company are “representing” and their office has no company name on the door, just the unit number. Anther thing is the email they used was mikecurry1958@yahoo.com, very similar to mikecurry2003@yahoo.com that I later found out was a boiler room. The script I was given was also similar to ones that I saw on the internet, that were used in boiler rooms.
My gut tells me that it is a boiler room, but I woulkd like to get other poeple’s opinon about it.
Thanks!!
marmalade, if you would like some more information to pass on to you buddies let me know.
Best answer:
Answer by marmalade
Sounds that way to me. Why would a recruitment company be calling people in Europe about financial services ? As you probably know the financial services industry is highly regulated in the EU and so often boiler rooms are set up outside the EU for the purposes of calling into the EU in order to evade this regulation. In fact, all it takes is a call from an EU financial services regulator requesting assistance from their Thai counterparts and there is a raid and the poor clueless sods that work the phones in the boiler room end up being arrested.
I have no specific information or knowledge about that company you are referring to and for all I know they are have the proper licenses. However, I do have some contacts at the Financial Services Authority in the UK who would probably be quite interested in this.
[Added: this is an interesting list but may be out-of-date:
http://www.crimes-of-persuasion.com/Crimes/Telemarketing/Outbound/Major/Investments/overseas_ops.htm
Give your answer to this question below!
