https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobbycasey/ (Bobby Casey) is managing partner of Global Wealth Protection. His company helps clients from around the world to internationalize their assets and take advantage of unique investment opportunities globally. Bobby is a lifelong entrepreneur, investor, and student of life. He is a believer in privacy and freedom and fights this fight through words and actions globally. As a renowned speaker on anarcho-capitalism, free-market economics, and offshore business, Bobby travels the globe working with like-minded clients to help them properly structure their businesses and their lives to minimize risk and maximize reward. He holds two undergraduate degrees: a Bachelor of Science (BS) in finance with a minor in economics; and a BS in international business with a minor in Russian. He also holds a master’s in entrepreneurship from MIT.

“In reality, the worst investment ever related to taxes is not taking the time to properly plan and minimize your tax obligation.”

– Bobby Casey

Worst investment ever

Not putting effort into minimizing taxes is a mistake by inaction

He says his No. 1 worst investment ever was probably the same as it is for every person listening to the podcast – taxes. In a way, he is joking. But what he really means is people don’t think about taxes as being a bad investment, because most people think they’re doing something they must do. However, the first time they write a six-figure check for taxes, it should make them think about what other better action could be done with that money than pay those taxes. He doesn’t mean breaking the law. But he says, while abiding by the law, there are a lot of things people can do to minimize taxes. Many people don’t think about it and write it off as the cost of success, but Bobby points out they could have reinvested that $40,000 or $80,000 into something significantly better if they had taken the available and necessary steps.

Substantially worst investment

For several years, Bobby used to host around two offshore investment conferences a year, primarily in the Caribbean. Around that time, he developed personal connections in the private investment space who had opportunities they were promoting, and the events gave people a chance to learn about alternative investment solutions other than just building a stock and bond portfolio. Bobby become close with one apparently hard-working guy, “Rick” (not his real name), who was offering such private investment options on the conference circuit, giving presentations, and raising money for his private company. At the time, he was selling preferred shares in his company, and Bobby bought about $100,000 worth of private preferred shares, for him a substantial sum at the time.

Rick was doing press releases relating his success in bringing in lucrative investors, sometimes $5 million clients, sometimes $10 million, and saying what returns were going to be achieved. One release said, “We’re going to be up 300% this year.” Bobby was impressed.

Adding credibility to the investment considerably was that Rick gained approval to take the company public on NASDAQ, and Bobby watched him on TV ringing the opening bell on the first IPO day of trading. Bobby thought he was going to make a killing on the stock. Rick even employed a friend Bobby had introduced.

Enterprise exposed as a complex fraud

The result was something far from a success. From top to bottom, the operation was a complete pump-and-dump scam. Rick was raising money selling preferred shares, speaking at conferences everywhere, in order to raise the stock price. With the millions of dollars he took for preferred shares, with all the press releases, Rick really did have a business, but it was not nearly as profitable or busy as he had claimed.

Rick was arrested at an airport during an SEC investigation of his fraudulent pump and dump scheme. He had been taking money from the company promotions, funneling it through