don't go near them

We are a couple of pensioners. If you want to lose a quick R3500 this is how to do it. My wife saw this invest-$250-in-Amazon advert and thought it might be worth trying it. We duly deposited this R3500 into the designated account at Oinvest after inquiring. We received a phone call from a trade consultant (or something like that) from Oinvest, who was to assist us with the investment. Before I go any further, I have been in contact with a number of people from Oinvest. Every person we have spoken to so far has a foreign accent (Middle-eastern, Israeli or something like that). They are extremely quick talking, and very quickly get you confused, especially if you are old and dumb like me! The problem is that none of them seemed to be able to slow down, even when asked to do so. So this guy helped us to create a log in account and I quickly found myself immersed in what appeared to be the world of forex trading. He seemed to be deaf to my protestations that we were not interested in trading on line, as he led me through two purchases, each R500 (i.e. R1000 in the market, R2500 left in the trading account). I kept telling him I did not want to do the trading myself, and said they should do so on our behalf. This did not seem to deter him however. Instead, he then began to tell me about how I must invest in Apple as they were about to release their latest iPhone, and that the investment would probably quadruple in a short period of time after the launch. He said that the minimum amount you could invest there worked out to around R94,000. Stupidly I transferred R100,000 to my credit card account in preparation for this, but luckily my hand-brake worked well enough to help me wait a few days to give this some thought. Realizing this could turn out to be one of my (really) dumb moves I decided against it. In the meantime we had left for a 10-day trip to the Cape, and on returning home I received a call from this same guy saying what a pity it was I was not busy trading during that time, as my R1000 “investment” had shot up by R700 but, sadly, now it had dropped back into the negative zone. At any rate, after that, I logged in occasionally to see what was happening, and the balance seemed to range between R2500 to R3500, so I decided to request what was left to be refunded to the card account I had paid in from. I was to contact customer care, who in turn told me they can’t do anything from their side, but that only the account manager (this trading consultant) would be able to assist. Needless to say he was not very helpful. I got pushed to and fro between customer care and the traders (from pillar to post) with no luck. After about a month of trying to figure out how I was going to recover my money, and once again checking to see what was still there in my account I was shocked to find that all I had left was a balance of R71. I called them up again and they informed me I should have been trading every day (even 2 or 3 times a day), and that my loss was for not having traded for a whole month. Please don’t touch them even with a barge pole! My biggest blunder was not to consult Hello Peter before I invested, as I see a lot of very similar stories, some investors losing amounts of money hugely in excess of what I lost.