The joker brokers: the world's saddest get rich quick scheme

We all have financially backward relatives, but this story about a dad tricked into spending 7+ years negotiating fake billion dollar contracts for no pay is a doozy. It comes from an anonymous business forum where someone posted a thread about stupid parents. In the thread, users would share anecdotes like "dad thinks investing in the stock market is a scam, but has been collecting every limited edition beer cans since the 70s thinking they'll be worth a ton some day."

But no anecdote could have prepared them for what was to come. The joker broker tale started simple enough with this post from a user with the temporary handle MYNFWavb:

You guys have genius parents compared to my father.

Can't get into details ATM, but basically he's been working a job that makes absolutely no sense for over 7 years without making any money whatsoever, and he still 100% believes it's going to make him a billionaire in less than a week. Every week.

I'd really like to see someone beat this.

He continued:

I'm dead serious.

He and an astonishingly large number of people sit all day on Skype playing pretend broker, where they work as intermediaries for multi-billion dollar deals (sometimes it's even in the trillions).

They do moronic things like selling historical bonds for their nominal 8-figure value when they're worth 50 bucks at most because they're not valid anymore and are sold as a collection item.

They send him pictures of the (often homeless-looking) owner with 50 of them in his hands trying to sell them for 10 billions or stuff like that.

They talk about private placement programs that yield 500% daily on multi-billion dollar investments, or about trading commodities in absurd quantities (they once worked on a deal where the amount of gold being sold exceeded all the mined gold in the world).

Also a ton of other type of businesses that a child couldn't believe, but I CBA to type them all. You get the idea.

The seller/buyer is always some random guy (often from a third world country) that allegedly acts on behalf of world-power governments and huge companies like Gazprom, Saudi Aramco, etc.

All the proof they have is some amateurly-made PDF that could have been made by anyone with a computer, or even a real one with edited data.

They all come from all walks of life that aren't related to finance and in 7+ years that he's done this he never met anyone who closed one of these deals (obviously), but he believes a lot of people become rich because every time one of his collaborators gets out of this (and changes his number/skype), they all believe that it must be because he got rich and doesn't want to share with his former collaborators.

All they know about finance they learned from one another and believe the words of some random guy on the Internet who never even closed 1 deal as gospel.

They also spend half their time arguing about how to split the multi-billion dollar commission despite all of them being dirt-poor (except the rare few who also have other jobs, which are at most middle class).

I think they call them "Joker Brokers", and the whole thing is basically moronic scammers trying to scam other scammers with a bunch of morons in the middle believing both.

I still don't understand how moronic this thing is. FFS, even those nigerian 419 scammers are smarter than this.

Then I remember how much of an all-around moron he is and everything makes sense.

This is not even the stupidest thing he's done. Only the most damaging, as it has fricked our family beyond repair on so many levels.

Anon asks:

This is too stupid to be a lie.

But how can it be real? How can so many people fall for something so completely surreal?

To which MYNFWavb responds:

I ask myself the exact same thing almost every day.

I especially find it hard to rationalize how he still believes all these things after I show him all the proofs that they're fake.

Neither fact, nor logic, nor pure and simple data work with him. He'd rather believe what his friend told him on Skype than Wikipedia or some .gov website.

Anon:

holy frick is your dad a Nigerian scam artist or something? does he have strong juju?

MYNFWavb:

Nope. At least Nigerians don't actually believe the bullshit they're saying.

Anon:

That's pretty bad man. Seven years, why does he think anyone is gonna buy the bridge he's selling? If he worked a regular fricking job he could have been manager by now (well, if he wasn't moronic.)

MYNFWavb:

He actually had his own company which wasn't making a lot, but was new and was starting to make serious profits. He simply ignored it and started to do this.

When prodded for more stories about the joker brokers, he continued:

I don't remember much, as these things happened in the last 7 years and I've stopped paying attention years ago because honestly this shit triggers me more than Trump triggers liberals.

I got to read many of his emails and documents, and half of them were clearly translated with Google Translate or something similar, and the other half were written by someone who learned English from someone who doesn't speak English. Remember these were supposedly from powerful governments and companies.

They often had a copy of the passport of the guy selling/purchasing and they were fake in a laughably obvious way. For example, the image was a grainy scan with jpeg artifacts (to the point of making it hard to read), but the picture was crisp as frick and partially covered the staples of the real picture, and the text was often just typed over the old one with MS Paint in a different font and color (not to mention the real text still being visible underneath).

I remember one time showing him how ridiculously fake one passport was by showing him all these things, and he still believed it was real, and even tried to trick me by opening a scan of his own passport and zooming on some text that didn't identify him to try and get me to say that this one was fake too, despite it not having any of the characteristics that made the old one fake, and the little detail that he opened it in front of me and I saw it was his.

Needless to say, he still believed the passport was real and went on with the deal.

This other time, he was working on a multi-billion dollar deal where the buyer or seller was a man that had a familiar name, so I googled him and remembered that he's a z-list celebrity because he's the husband of a singer that was kinda famous 30 or 40 years ago and now appears on shitty tv-shows like all failed celebrities do.

When I told him this he responded that he knew and it seemed real to him because "someone like her wouldn't marry a nobody so it makes sense that she's married to someone like that". Yes, he believed an old failed celebrity was married to a man who handled tens of billions.
You guessed it, he still kept working on the deal.

One of the things that baffle me the most is their use of "digital signatures".

Since all their documents are digital, they sign their documents by scanning their signature on a piece of paper and putting the jpg image at the bottom of the document. I don't work with this stuff, so I don't know if it's normal, but that's not what's strange.

What really baffles me, is that to make things quicker, instead of giving the documents to the person who has to sign them, and wait for them to do it, they just extract the image from the PDF of an old document and apply it to the new one. They literally don't see anything wrong with it and it's almost standard procedure. The same goes with passport copies and other documents.

Luckily for them, none of this stuff is real, so nothing happens. Imagine if they did this for a real deal and after everything progressed to be closed the guy found out he didn't actually sign the contracts and they were signed for him without him knowing anything about their contents.

One time I was explaining to him that these numbers don't make any sense and it's impossible that some foundation (for some reason there's always a foundation involved, that's for some reason investing extreme amounts of money) is investing 200 billions into a PPP that would yeld them 1 trillion a month (I'm not exagerating), and just showed him that this kind of money would cure poverty forever in a year, and that there are entire countries going to shit that would need a fraction of that to be saved, that Bill Gates could do this for his foundation instead of begging other billionaires for their pathetic billions when it's so easy to make trillions, that this money has to come from somewhere and that nobody has this kind of wealth, etc.

He responded that it doesn't matter because it's not like real money, but it's just digital money in a digital bank account, so it's possible.

I then asked him if it's not real money, what's the point of earning these "fake" virtual trillions, and if his commission, being a percentage of these earnings, will be paid in virtual money as well, why is he working on this if he won't be able to use them to pay the bills and buy stuff.

He didn't answer and years later he still keeps doing this stuff regardless.

He thinks and acts as if the concept of risk didn't exist in his mind.

He's 100% convinced that he's going to be successful each and every deal. Nevermind the thousands of failed ones. Nevermind never ever seeing a single one of them being closed (not by him, nor by others). This current one is the right one!

He doesn't plan ahead because there's no need to calculate risk when you're 100% gonna be a billionaire in a week.

Except it's all based on shit that at best is uncertain and unreliable ("you really think someone would do that? just go on the internet and tell lies?"), so he always ends up with nothing.
It's also the reason why he started in the first place.

Any reasonable individual wouldn't put all their eggs in a basket that he only just heard about.

Anyone with a brain would've dismissed this as bullshit.

Any moron would have done this as a side thing until it became profitable enough to replace the old income.

But it takes an actual braindead moron to immediately stop what he was doing before to start doing this, before even knowing if anyone ever made a dollar doing it.

It's like he left his job to follow his dream of becoming a pro athlete, except the sport is fricking quidditch. And then, alongside his other moronic friends, kept spending years trying to fly on his broom insisting that it's possible and he's gonna make it anytime soon (because he's heard of people managing to fly and play the game, so it's obviously possible).

Also, he does a lot of moronic things that aren't really related to these "joker broker" endeavors.
For example, a few years before starting this, he hired a psychic to come to our house and do some examination ritual to see if there was something in our house that gave off some negative energy or shit like that, so we could remove it and let his company be successful.

He decided it was the computer keyboard and my father threw it away.

The funniest part is that he found out about this guy because a tv show made a piece about him scamming people in my city and debunking his psychic abilities.

He also has 3 different books about the meaning of dreams and believes all three tell the truth despite them having three completely different meanings for each dream.

And when I say "meaning of dreams" I'm not talking about stuff like "if your dream has X it means you're stressing yourself too much". I'm talking about "if your dream has X it means you're going to be very rich in the near future" or "if your dream has X it means someone close to you is going to pass away soon" and shit like that.

One book gives optimistic results, one gives pessimistic ones, and the other tells you which numbers to play lotto with, along with a little random prediction.

He's had them for decades and the pessimistic one looks almost new kek.

These are the last ones for now. I'll write more as they come to my mind.

Anon:

I don't really understand what the point of this. I got it that your father is stuck between scammers but what scammers are actually aiming for by doing this ? Who are they trying to scam ? They try to make a false deal, then ask money for things like "Legal fees for the deal" etc ?

MYNFWavb:

AFAIK they're either scammers actually trying to scamming billionaires (they apparently believe the same things joker brokers do), or scammers trying to scam the intermediaries by asking for money like you said, or by taking them to a physical meeting and robbing them and things like that.
I remember reading many creative ways these scammers managed to steal money but all I remember is a variation of the methods above.

Also, when it's about selling historical bonds and other cheap things for a lot of money, I'm under the impression that some of them actually believe they're worth that much (because that's what's written on them, right?) and that somehow the guy who sold them was an idiot or something.
I could be wrong though.

The stories continue to flow:

One extremely pathetic thing I noticed in many of them, was the extreme lying about each and every aspct of their lives.

A few of these pathological liars pretend to be in some sort of extremely bad situation as a multi-purpose excuse. For example, they would say that they've closed many deals (and are very wealthy as a consequence), but can't travel because they (or their relatives) are bedridden due to some severe illness or something similar, so they can't travel, meet people in person, spend too much time working (because they probably had a day job and had to justify all those hours of inavailability). They would spend half of their time talking about day-to-day details like having the house full of medical machines, their encounters with the ambulance they had to call, etc.

One guy even said he was terminal, and only had a few months to live, and kept repeating it for years until suddenly he wasn't terminal anymore kek.

That's the minority of liars though. The majority were the ones who roleplayed as skilled professionals like lawyers and economists (which would often say the dumbest shit that would make even my father laugh at them), or wealthy big-shots in the international financial world, and would do stuff like pretending to go to a different country every day for important meetings, talk about vacations to exclusive locations, meeting famous and important people, etc.

The funniest one was this woman who would interrupt each and every call by saying stuff like "wait, hang on a second, I've got Putin calling me on the other line" or "Sorry, I'll respond to Obama about a quick issue and call you in five minutes". This one was truly surreal. I don't even think any of these joker brokers believed her.

The fact that they kept working with her and only regarded this compulsive lying as a funny quirk of hers truly says a lot.

Obviously most of their lies were too absurd to be true, and many were very inconsistent, so it was easy to spot the liars, but some of them got caught because someone found their true identity and discovered it was all fake (either by meeting them in person, or finding their real FB page, etc).

Some of them even blew the cover themselves, like one guy who spent months pretending to be a wealthy millionaire who owned multiple 5-star hotels, then called my father to ask for money to buy cigarettes.

I know all these things because most of the conversations are done on Skype and my father doesn't always use headphones, so I got to hear their conversations (plus what I manage to extrapolate from just my father's side when he used headphones or talks on the phone), and also read many of their emails.

I can only imagine how much bullshit I'm missing. These people are cartoon characters.

The woman who always interrupted phonecalls by pretending to be talking with presidents and such, once went to an IRL meeting with her collaborators, and she had her hair combed in front of her face to cover it, with sunglasses on top.

There was another guy that had a name that someone googled and found a few articles about his arrest for crimes related to this stuff. When asked about it, he would respond that it's not him, and that he looks way different than the guy in those pictures from the articles.

When they met IRL he looked exactly like those pictures.

Another guy, literally in the first call he had with my father, right after the presentations, asked for a small loan (Trump reference unintended) of 125.000 Dollars justifying so with "If you're a professional broker working in this field, it must be nothing to you".

There was this woman who would constantly be angry and would cuss and yell all the time.

She would describe her life as very lavish of course, and would tell her collaborators about his fantastic husband.

He was rich, tall, handsome, and was so strong that once, after an argument, he got angry and lifted her with the chair she was sitting on, and put her out of the window, holding her there with his arms stretched front for a minute or so while arguing with her until he decided to take her inside.

Did I mention she's morbidly obese?

She also unironically said her husband has 160cm (5.25 ft) wide shoulders. I think her husband is truly a fantastic man.

Another guy would start his calls by saying that he's in some city for a meeting with a president or some other very elite activity, and that he's in some 5-star hotel.

This was not only unbelievable for the same obvious reason as the other ones, but also because every time, his voice was drowned in the same huge reverb from the room he was in.

Maybe he's so rich that he was able to coincidently get huge hotel rooms of the same size and take out all the furniture every time, though.

You want more? Check out our article 6 incredibly stupid cons that actually worked and see just how stupid people (who aren't you) can get.