The "guest experts" left some crumbs behind

MYSTERY POST: Between banknotes and potatoes, pick the latter

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In my post about “guest experts” on Zee Business earlier this month, I wrote:

If you research a stock and figure that it’s undervalued, sure it makes sense to recommend the stock to your clients or viewers or whoever. That’s your job done. People can then choose how to actually do the investing. They could buy the company shares directly, a straightforward choice, or they could buy a call option, a risky choice. You do the research, recommend the company. The investor decides how she wants the exposure to the company.

This ticked off a couple of readers. Because, of course, there are legit analysts that also recommend stock options. So recommending a stock option to investors isn’t that unusual.

Fine! I’m not going to argue against this logic. Instead, here’s me presenting the names of the shows that these “guest experts” had on TV:

1. KIRAN KA KAMAL

2. HITMAN HIMANSHU

3. MUDIT KE MUNAFE

4. SIMI KE NON STOP SHARES

If you’re watching a show called “Hitman Himanshu” and if Himanshu turns out not to be a contract killer but someone who offers you financial advice, I would call it, with a fairly high confidence level, a scam. Is it necessary that it’s a scam? Absolutely not. But is it likely that there’s something scammy happening behind the scenes? Most definitely.¹

Something else that was funny about this guest expert episode is the way in which these folks tried to hide their tracks. Nirmal Kumar Soni, the main profit maker who collected information from a bunch of the TV guests, had to give them their kickback. He couldn’t just UPI the money to them, so it had to be in cash. But then they also had to communicate with each other about who was paid how much. Here’s the route they took: