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I recently received an inquiry about some artwork on my online portfolio. The email was very specific, listing individual pieces, and stating that they were for a new library in Lichtenstein (street address and all). I traded emails with “Shan Oakes” and when it came time to ship the work, he suggested I contact a shipping company he trusted. Something was off, so I did some digging and figured out that the email did not come from Lichtenstein but from Nigeria.

I’ve receive tons of these scam letters, but this is the first time someone sought me out personally and with such great detail. If this actually played out, I’m sure this shipping company would’ve asked me for an advance, etc. etc. Luckily it didn’t reach that point. And I still have my artwork!

Full thread:

From: Shan Oakes
Subject: Purchase of Art

Good day,
I am a librarian in a private library here in Liechtenstein and we are looking at equipping and beautifying our Library with artworks of diverse artist in order to lecture and broaden our students horizon on art and culture when they come to the library to study and read books on art and culture.
We will be glad if you can assist us with how to purchase the artworks from your website and we shall make payment immediately with charge card (Visa or Master card)either one you prefer for the purchase before you send the artwork to us.
We anticipate your kindness in assisting us with the purchase.
Sincerely
Shan Oakes

To: Shan Oakes <shanoakes@rocketmail.com>
Subject: Re: Purchase of Art

Hello Shan,
Thank you for contacting me about my artwork. Which were you interested? I’d be happy to speak with you in greater detail about any piece.

From: Shan Oakes
Subject: Re: Purchase of Art

Great hearing from you, I want you to get back to me with the cost of each and shipping cost of the below:

(List of Sculptures)

I want you to get back to me with the cost and shipping of the above so that you can have the credit card to run for the payment.
I will be looking forward to hear from you asap.
Thanks
Shipping Address
Shan Oakes
Gerberweg 10
FL-9490 Vaduz
Liechtenstein

To: Shan Oakes <shanoakes@rocketmail.com>
Subject: Re: Purchase of Art

Hello Shan,
I will have to inquire at UPS and other carriers regarding crating, shipping, and insurance to Lichtenstein. In the meantime, I wanted to give you some other details to help in your decision. Sculpture 1 is approximately 10 lbs (4.5 kgs). Sculpture 2 is approximately 30 lbs (13.5 kgs). I’ve attached some higher resolution photos for your review.
I will get back to you with a more complete quote after I contact some shippers.
Thank you again for your interest, Shan!

From: Shan Oakes
Subject: Re: Purchase of Art

Hi,
How are you doing today,your family and business?
I am okay with the cost of the painting therefore i want you to get them packed.On the shipping,one will have to pay additional fee at the delivery point here in Liechtenstein because they will never bring to ones address. courier like Fedex, UPS are not worth it here especially USPS all of them are not rendering good service here probably because they already known very well.
You can contact this courier Hush Delivery Service (hushdelivery@hush.com) as well with the weight and cost of the artwork for the shipping and insurance to my address because they ship and deliver safely without one paying any other money before collecting the goods unlike some other courier where it will not be delivered to your address rather you will have to go to their office to pick it up and when you get there you will be told to pay other money before collecting it.
I will be looking forward to hearing from you asap.
Thanks
Shipping Address
Shan Oakes
Gerberweg 10
FL-9490 Vaduz
Liechtenstein

To: Shan Oakes
Subject: Re: Purchase of Art

Hello Shan,
Thank you for asking about my family and business. To be honest, not so well. My wife is in the hospital. That is where I was most of today, so I could not respond earlier. Her illness has been a drain on my business so I’m very thankful for your order. It could not have come at a better time.
I wish I’d received your email earlier because I actually took my sculptures to a local shipping company this morning and they said it’d be no problem to ship them to your address. They are packing them and shipping them now through a company called Unishipper and will arrive to you in about 2 weeks. The shipping cost was less than expected, only $100. So as a thank you for purchasing TWO of my pieces, I will cover that cost. Thank you! When you receive them, we can exchange credit card information for the total.
I hope you will take a photo of them in your library for my portfolio since I will probably never see them again in person! Thanks again!
All the best to you.

To: Shan Oakes
Subject: Re: Purchase of Art

Hello Shan,
I just received a notice from Unishipper that my artwork has been delivered. Have you had a chance to inspect it? I hope nothing broke in transit. I have the paperwork ready once you’re ready to settle up our credit card charges.
Nice doing business with you! Again, please take a photo of my sculptures on display so that I can put them in my portfolio.
Thanks.

I was buying a ticket for an upcoming trip and found a decent fare on delta.com. I paid for the ticket with my credit card, but a few days later I realized that I’d used the “wrong” credit card. By that I mean that in these tough times, many of us are managing balances on multiple credit cards. I charged the ticket on a card I hadn’t intended to use. No worries, I thought. Maybe I can just ask them to charge a different credit card. So I call their call center and explain the situation to an agent. I’d like to have the exact same ticket, but I’d like to use a different credit card. “It’s already been charged.” Yes, I know, but can you reverse that and just charge a different card now? “No, you’d have to refund the entire ticket and repurchase it.” Okay, is there a charge for that? “Yes, your ticket has a $150 change fee.” Huh? But I’m not changing anything. I want to continue doing business with you (a rarity with airlines these days) – no changes to seat numbers, flights, heck, it’s even the same price online today. I’d just like to charge a different credit card. “Can’t do that, you bought the ticket a few days ago.”

Now I thought I understood the purpose of change fees, but I’m confused now. Who knows why they wouldn’t allow me to swap credit cards. Maybe their systems are too outdated to do this. Maybe they don’t have the checks-and-balances in place to allow their agents to edit the transactions. Maybe someone at some time figured out some way to game the system by doing what I wanted to do. (How? Who knows.) But I think the answer is really this: they just don’t want to be bothered.

Back in the fall of 2009, I got a call from an Ameriprise advisor who’d gotten my information from a colleague. I’d never had a professional advisor, but like a lot of people, always felt uneasy about how my retirement portfolio was doing. And coincidentally, I had just rebalanced my entire portfolio. At our initial consultation, she talked a good game, claiming that she could essentially turn $1 into $1.50 in a year. I knew enough to recognize that as a pitch, but decided to sign on.

During our subsequent series of discovery meetings, she poked holes in my current portfolio (I didn’t take it personally), and made my head spin with long explanations of benchmarks, alphas, betas…. It was a lot to take in! I broke down my expectations for our engagement in simple terms. I wanted to try this for a year and my benchmark was simple: I just wanted to know that she was doing better than I was doing on my own. Even if she broke even, I’d consider her advisory fee the cost of not having to worry about my portfolio.

So we continued on our way. I was slightly peeved that a bell didn’t go off when I told her I’d just rebalanced my portfolio, so I was hit with some short-term trading fees. I would’ve thought a professional would hear that and say, “Hey, let’s wait a month-or-so before starting this.” But that may have been an unrealistic expectation. There was nothing to be done about it by then anyway, so I chalked it up as a misunderstanding.

I don’t know what level of communication is common for these engagements, but ours was pretty infrequent. In fact, I later realized that she missed the quarterly call that was in our original plan. As we approached our midyear meeting, I wanted to see how she was doing against my “benchmark”. But how? Here’s a tip for anyone who shares my expectations for a professional advisor: Open a hypothetical portfolio at Morningstar.com. Look at your last statement from your old brokerage and enter all of your investments. Morningstar will track them and even calculate dividend reinvestments.

I told my advisor that I would be bringing my Morningstar reports to our midyear meeting to see “what would’ve happened if I’d never walked through that door.” The results weren’t great. Her investments were trailing mine by quite a bit. I have no idea whether she was offended by this exercise, but to me it made perfect sense: how else was I to know what I was getting out of this? I was certainly not standoffish; I had committed to this for a year and I owed it to my advisor not to jump the gun.

The next six months were just as silent as the previous ones. I watched her portfolio plug along and compared each statement with my Morningstar portfolio. Our end-of-year meeting was approaching and there was still a significant gap between them. Here’s where things got tense: she delayed my EOY meeting several times. On one occasion, she canceled on me while I was on my way to her office. Was she avoiding our meeting intentionally? Who knows. What I do know is that the final meeting was brief. We looked over her investments and my Morningstar portfolio and we both knew that it was unlikely that I’d continue with this. She told me to give it some time before I made a final decision and even asked for some tweaks to my numbers to try to explain the differences. Any way you sliced it, the answer was clear: this was a loss.

I began the process of moving the investments back to my old brokerage. That was fun! Of course there were exorbitant transfer and closure fees on EACH account. I’d remembered that at our first meeting, my advisor had mentioned that her fee was refundable if I wasn’t satisfied at the end of our engagement. I downloaded the form from Ameriprise’s website and sent it in. Lo and behold, my refund request was rejected because I didn’t send it in within 30 days of the one-year anniversary of our first meeting! In other words, if our final meeting hadn’t been delayed several times, I wouldn’t have missed the deadline! How convenient!

After months of back-and-forth with Ameriprise corporate, I finally received my refund. Does the story end there? No, of course not! I still had to liquidate my advisor’s investments at my new brokerage. What, they’re special “Class B” funds with exorbitant “deferred sales charges”? How convenient again! To top it all off, there is still one fund that I can’t get rid of: some funky “real estate investment trust” (REIT) that she signed me up for. Yeah, google “REIT” and “Ameriprise” and you can read about a class-action lawsuit they were involved in regarding hidden commissions. Apparently, the REIT had been doing so poorly that a few months after she purchased it, the REIT was closed for all purchases and sales! It’s now in some “cryogenic” state for an indefinite amount of time. Wait for it… HOW CONVENIENT THRICE!

Hopefully this story will have a real ending soon, but until then… YOU HAVE BEEN FOREWARNED. Adios, Ameriprise!

UPDATE: I am still unable to unload the REIT (“Hines” REIT, to be specific) that Ameriprise dumped me with. Hines just informed me that their value nosedived by 20% but there’s still no way to dump it. Well, actually there is a way: a few third-party companies (“Mackenzie Patterson Fuller” and “MIRELF”) have sent me letters offering to take it off my hands for less than half its value. How kind!

Thinking back, I recall some interesting advice my Ameriprise advisor gave me at our final meeting. She said, “Don’t sell the Hines REIT. That’s one you’ll want to hold on to for a long time.” I imagine she said that because she already knew that the fund had shut down sales and I couldn’t sell even if I wanted to! Thanks for the advice!

This week, I was researching flights for a summer trip. I came across a good fare at CheapOAir.com via the aggregator Mobissimo.com. I purchased the tickets for $2300, noting the big “NON-REFUNDABLE” message before submitting. The next evening, I received an email from CheapOAir stating that the tickets could not be issued. They offered an alternate itinerary (for incorrect dates) for $2800. I sat on hold until I could reach a human for an explanation. They said that the flight I had booked was cancelled, which was a lie – I checked on another website while they were on the phone. I asked why they weren’t going to honor their price when I had already submitted my purchase and the flight was in fact available. They said that my purchase price was due to a technical glitch and they weren’t obligated to honor it. How is this not bait-and-switch? It took them an entire day to get back to me while other flights I had considered were now higher. If they want to make it a fair fight, they should state that all tickets are cancellable within 48 hours so that I can at least go through the trouble of purchasing backup tickets!

It was a simple order for flowers. Thanks for completely dropping the ball on it! It all started when FTD notified me that their florist was out of blue vases; would a clear vase do? “Yes, of course!” FTD then put me on hold to notify their florist. The florist was not picking up, so they left them a voicemail. “There shouldn’t be any other issues with the order. Have a nice day!” Apparently, FTD doesn’t do a very good job following up on their florists. The order never went out and it was too late to resend it. Curiously, I asked for the name of their florist that had failed to deliver and they said it’s their policy not to disclose their florists. If I were FTD, I’d at least disclose this information so that their customers could stay clear of ordering directly from that florist again. Sayonara!

Painted a room with standard Behr a few weeks ago. Great color (“moonlight yellow”), but bad finish. Had to do three coats! Was getting awful banding at the edges. Yes, I know, I didn’t prime. But I was painting over white walls, which is only a half-sin. Swore off Behr paint after that.

Recently, decided to give their Behr Ultra a try. It costs a little more, but they claim that you don’t have to prime under it. Worked out great. Painted a room a “brick red” with two coats. The color came out rich and consistent.

Behr, you’ve redeemed yourself!

My home security system, a DSC PC500, was on the fritz. Battery kept dying every few months. These are specialty batteries that aren’t cheap ($30-40). And a service call to the security company would’ve broken the bank. So I ordered a Battery Tender Jr. from Amazon.com. Now, every few months, I charge up the battery overnight and I’m good to go by morning. Yeah, it’s another thing to do, but it beats shelling out to the security company.

I’m officially through with Citibank. Took over 3 months to resolve 3 fraudulent charges, all made on the same day to Playstation and XBox. I don’t even have a video game system! Citibank kept reinstating the charge for reasons that I still don’t understand. I called them the day that I received my statement in the mail. They told me to call each company on my own, which I did immediately. The customer service reps at Playstation and XBox were confused – “Isn’t your credit card company supposed to be handling this for you?” Yes, one would think. Every rep I talked to at Citibank could not explain to me why the charges kept getting reinstated without any warning. Well, they’re finally gone after 3 months. And so is the card, cut up and in the trash. Goodbye, Citibank!

Was pretty pleased with my GE (Jasco) In-Wall Digital Timer until today. Display started flickering, then just died. Light that the timer was controlling no longer worked. Supposedly this is a common problem with these devices – they contain a battery that can’t be replaced. Mine lasted for less than a year! I guess I could call them on their 1-year “limited warranty,” but why waste my time?

Just got back from our Honeymoon, which was partially arranged by “Naturally Morocco”. Should’ve just booked our own travel and accommodations. We really didn’t see the value of their services. We booked most of our own travel. The one train ticket that they were in charge of, they messed up the train times! Not only that, but they left us stranded at the train station – their driver never showed up! Luckily, our awesome host at our hotel in Marrakech was able to fix some of their mistakes. Never got one single attempt to check in and apologize for their mistakes. Our recommendation: read reviews, book your own travel and accommodations, and pass on “Naturally Morocco”.