The commercial I’ve seen makes this look like a doomsday prophecy. What’s the Straight Dope on this?
It’s an ad for a financial research service.
This is they typical buy gold cause the sky is falling type stuff. Just not going to watch an hour of this stuff - here is the transcript:
http://www.stansberryresearch.com/pro/1011PSIEND49/PPSILC42/PR
He doesn’t tell you what to do (which he said he would in the beginning). You need to buy his “research”.
Anytime you hear someone talk about “seizable assets” - 99% chance it is a scam.
Logic goes like this
- US when it went on the gold standard - banned people from owning gold. [true]
- There were exceptions to this - including numismatic gold coins - coins owned for collecting purposes. (true)
- Therefore - when the us goes through another depression - it will ban gold (uh - no it won’t - there was a reason last time) - and of course - will still have an exception for numismatic coins.
Guess who then happens to know has numismatic coins for a good value? That is right - the scammer. Conveniently - many of this are foreign coins in weird weights - why - so that the old people who buy these can’t figure out how much they are really worth.
Don’t know if that is what is happening here, but that is the setup.
I’ll comment only on the web aspects of this, not the gold:
The web address mentioned in your post title is a throwaway domain, intended as a sort of insulating buffer when sending spam or making dubious claims. The reason there’s a 33 in the address is most likely that there are at least 32 other such addresses. It redirects to a paid affiliate link.
In most cases, the “advertiser”, the owner of the throwaway domain, and the operator of the affiliate program are three separate and independent parties; often the affiliate program is being scammed. In this particular case, some clues suggest the owner of the throwaway domain is directly associated with the affiliate site, and may even be one and the same.
In short: regardless of what product they’re selling, the mere fact that a vendor would employ such measures is a big hint that they are not to be trusted.
Mods: the presence of the web addresses in this post is likely to attract spammers, you may want to edit them.
DataX, Yeah I figured it was some kind of scam.
Tellyworth, Thanks for the explanation regarding the number 33. When you say “some clues suggest the owner of the throwaway domain is directly associated with the affiliate site, and may even be one and the same,” are the clues from reading the content on the site, or from reading the coding of the site?
Code, DNS, whois, etc.