Common Gold Scams To Avoid | Andy Schectman

**Adam Taggart** (0:01)
All right, and we should be live. Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money Founder and your host, Adam Taggart, welcoming you here for a special live stream. This Wednesday morning, we are joined as usual when we talk about gold and silver by precious metals expert Andy Schectman. Andy, how are you doing?

**Andy Schectman** (0:17)
I am well. How are you, Adam? Thanks for having me.

**Adam Taggart** (0:20)
Well, thanks for coming back on. Thanks for jumping on so soon after returning from one of your latest travels. You are one of the most traveled men I know, Andy. So, very much appreciate you waking up early.

**Andy Schectman** (0:31)
It's good to be here. It's good to be here. Pardon my, hopefully, my synapses are firing after five nights in Las Vegas. It'll be a miracle if I'm able to connect the dots here, but I'll give it my best shot.

**Adam Taggart** (0:45)
No, I'm sure you're going to be great. Now, for folks watching, we at the end of Andy's last appearance on this channel, which was about two weeks ago, we started to get into the topic of some of the bigger, for lack of a better word, scams that go on in the gold and silver precious metals industry. And we didn't have enough time to do the topic justice and ask the audience, hey, would you like us to get more into this next time Andy comes on the channel? And of course, the interest exploded and said, yes, please, absolutely. So, Andy, why don't we try to start where we left off last time, which was, I think, one of the biggest frauds that you see out there, frauds or abuse, is in the kind of gold in your, own gold in your IRA programs that are out there. Not that that's not necessarily a bad thing to do to hold some precious metals in your IRA, but there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. And B, it sounds like there's some potentially unscrupulous companies out there, that the way in which they implement this is very much not in the interests of most of their clients. So if I've kind of teed the ball up correctly, why don't we dive into that?

**Andy Schectman** (2:09)
Yeah, and I think it's important to, you know, how I stumbled across this. You know, I've been doing this for 35 years, and, you know, you didn't hear about companies like this most of my career. I have a client or a few clients along the way where family members or friends had stumbled into some of these problems and alerted me to it, sent me copies of their statements, few of which I've sent you just to give you an idea of what it's like. And I started digging a little bit more into it and I found out just how pervasive it was, did a few podcasts, and then I was contacted by a man who said, well, you know, I need to introduce you to my best friend's son, who's an FBI whistleblower, because I was taken by this and we helped this gentleman. And then he introduced me to Kyle Serifan, who is the FBI whistleblower. I went on his show and talked about this and received upwards ends. I don't know between that and a few shows I've done subsequently, north of 500 emails from people who have fallen prey to this issue. This is not being done to elevate Miles Franklin, my company, in any way. This is something that I have struggled with in terms of bringing it to the public, but doing it the right way. I would love to have a debate on your channel with any of the CEOs of these companies. I don't mention their names because I don't need to be dragged into a lawsuit or become any more visible on this stuff than I already am. But I will tell you the stuff that I see, I wish I could name their names because it's as criminal as anything I've ever witnessed in 35 years worth of business in this industry. Please keep that in mind that this was something I stumbled across and then realized when I have an 85-year-old man come up to me in tears saying he's going to get divorced if his wife finds out what's happened, it's over for him. That's just one experience of many that I've had that are torturously tragic. And I mean that sincerely and I'm not trying to sensationalize this. So when it's interesting, I have a friend and I don't know if I mentioned this last time, but he was a broker for Stratton Oakmont, the Wolf of Wall Street. And when I asked him about it, I said, did you get in trouble? He said, no, I left. Thankfully, the minute I found out it was bad that things were going on that were less than kosher above board. But he said, a lot of the guys that I signed up with, they left the main company. But with Jordan's blessing, Jordan Belfour, the owner, the Wolf of Wall Street, opened up other offices, satellite offices, that was when the exact same thing that he was. And I say that to you because there were all of these offices there doing the exact same thing. Well, that's what we see here. Every one of the companies, and I would like to name them, I can't, I'd like to, they all do the same thing. They all sell the same product. They all learned from somewhere. The whistleblower that was on Kyle's show was the CFO of a company. And he says that that company, if you go to Kyle Seraphan on YouTube, you can see the Sarah Westall on Rumble, I believe, also interviewed this same gentleman.