For a long time if you ever went into a doctor’s office or went into someone’s home it was not hard to find a Reader’s Digest. From the format of the Reader’s Digest, eventually large coffee table books were produced and one of many is Fakes & Forgeries, edited by Brian Innes, Reader’s Digest, Pleasantville, NY, 2005.

Phony Prehistory – one hopes this gets harder every year as we know more and more, but there are museums dedicated to prehistory which means there are budgets to be spent and are the bones really old?

Bogus Identity – if you do not like your name, it is possible to change it and start again or pick your new relatives or use someone else’s identity to pay for an upgrade in your lifestyle.

The Confidence Tricksters – the game runs longer perhaps even months to soften the victim up; they try to lure the person into the net and leave them much poorer and scarcely wiser. One excellent example is the movie The Sting.

Faking for a cause – this is when forgery is used or can be used for the greater good. If you watched movies about the Crusades you would have heard fragments of the true cross – the reality there was enough scattered to reassemble more than one cross. In war time the use of black ops or forgeries is a given between passports, currency, giving false information and printing currencies of the other side to make it worthless.

Suspect Science – medicine has a long history – people generally will pay for things to take away the pain. Some works, some works once in a while and some may feel like it works and some are there to make money for someone else.

Linking to dividend paying stocks,  there are numerous ideas that come onto the market and some of them are or pretty close to be frauds. The trick is therefore to invest in what already makes money; not what could make money under specific conditions. There are reasons why stocks are priced at pennies per share and there are reasons why dividend stocks trade much higher. The question for you is at the end of the day do you want real money or pretend money? if real money keep the overwhelming majority of your funds in these types of investments. If pretend money, do not use greater than 2% of your portfolio.  The idea is to preserve capital, but people are people so lose some that is life.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.