Scam Internship List: Be Aware

Gathered a list of fraudulent companies. Hope this can help people on this forum.


Alpha Capital Partners 

Blackmore Partners

Daroth Capital

Tobin & Co

Atleutian Capital

Bastien Capital

Chatsworth Securities

Seven Points Capital

Hyde Park Investment Services

Northwestern Mutual

New York International Capital (NYIC)

Selby Jennings

Ivyline Capital

Black Legend Capital

ArcForty

Cherokee Capital Holdings

Leedon Park

Gracewater Capital

Pinebrook Capital

Jump Investors

Amplify Trading

DeVere Group

LBN Advisors

Caspium Associates

Pursuit Advisory

Quire

Sutton Fund

Primerica

Multi National United

Hermes Capital

OVB Allfinanz

First Derivatives

Parcrest Advisors

Eastern Union

Romero Capital

AXA Advisors

Anything about Forex trading you see on Instagram


Remember, never pay for an internship

Feel free to add more names


 

Can confirm they are a bunch of scammers (gotta Pat them first and fake interviews)

 
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Yes he markers it as like a mentorship type thing but it’s really just a shitty paid finance course

 

I cold emailed them in April along with every other LA boutique for a summer internship, and they responded in June with an email saying any potential internship would have to be FULL TIME and three months minimum in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, I've now gone home for the summer because they took two months to respond and there aren't even three months left in the summer.

 

Full name is Black Legend Capital, but I couldn’t agree more

 

Disagree on this one. There are some shitshows out there for sure, but as someone that REALLY struggled initially with grades and finance in general, the search fund I went to was the saving grace for me when it came to junior year recruiting. 

Principal there was an incredible dude. Former military, very much a mentor, and kept us involved beyond sourcing. Got to do an LBO model, conduct diligence, etc. Super valuable and arguably learned more than I did in my junior M&A role in IB.

 

ArcForty, Cherokee Capital Holdings, Leedon Park, Gracewater Capital, Pinebrook Capital...looking at you UNC kids.

 

Oh god I go to UNC and know exactly what/who you're talking about. They all end up on PMT too.

 

some of those kids ended up at pretty good spots afterwards FWIW 

 

I go to a west coast school and saw so many kids have this. I can’t believe how many freshman they take each summer, makes sense it’s unpaid 

 

Interviewed with one of their "lead interns" back at the start of this year. I asked in-depth questions about what he did as an intern in the past summer and he basically said making the blog and youtube videos for their portfolio company Sandee, which he described as "the world's first beach brand". Took a look at the website and its basically Tripadvisor for beaches with some pictures of half naked models at the bottom of the page. The interviewer's pitch about the company sounded like he was reading from a script and he sounded pretty hesitant to tell me about what kind of work an intern would do because (not surprisingly) the work isn't useful at all.

 

I interned at JUMP too and the reason he was hesitant is probably because the CEO doesn’t like stuff getting divulged and there was a legit reminder about this every afternoon.

 

Amplify trading, £2000 for 4 weeks, questionable placement the following summer

 

Just to clarify it’s you pay them £2000 for 4 weeks to work for them

 

Lmao what? I just saw a dude post a 3-paragraph long humble brag about joining amplify trading on linkedIn

 

Seconded on this. Thought I was getting a commercial banking part-time job (which is what they pitched me) my sophomore year of college. 

When I asked if this was a sales job, the recruiter told me no. I get to training and they were talking about the different life insurance products we would be selling.

I stared at the recruiter during the training session for about 20 minutes and flat out walked out of the room.

 

Just updated the list! Feel free to add more names and hope this can help more students down the road.

 

"Anything about Forex trading you see on Instagram"

Yes, but this is true only to the extent that their strategies are bad/scammy/do not work/do not make sense, viz. strategies revolving exclusively around technical analysis and/or phases of the moon. There may be an argument for some forms of backtested technical analysis, but I much prefer the fundamentals with the belief that non-event driven patterns are mostly noise. I am not sure what your opinion is, but sometimes people automatically associate Forex with only scams and forget that there is a legitimate way to go about things, just as there are scammy and legitimate stock strategies.

 

Older guy here....can someone help me with the Northwestern Mutual hate on this site?  It is a legitimate life insurance company- not as "sexy" as an investment banking role no doubt but there are some good jobs there and I don't think the word "scam" is likely appropriate, at least not to describe the Company.  Do they misrepresent themselves? 

Commissioned sales is not for everyone and I'd imagine that it is a tough way to start a career.  But, can someone fill me in on how it makes the list of a bunch of other unheard of shops?    

 

Honestly there is nothing wrong with Northwestern Mutual, its a legit company, but idk it somehow has just evolved into a meme over time stemming from I think a bunch of previous interns making cringe linkedin posts, and the fact that they are at like every schools career fair so everybody has heard of them lol

 

Here’s my Northwestern Mutual story. While I was still in IB, a local college student reached out to me under the guise of networking to break into IB. It was the summer and slow so I met him for a coffee. He shows up with an older guy and proceeds to pitch me on buying services from them. As I sit there confused, he proceeds to pull out a print off of my LinkedIn contact and had a bunch of high profile PE, CEOs and my bosses circled and asked for introductions. I was honestly in shock. I yelled at the older guy and was out of there in about 5 min. The intern actually had the audacity to follow up and re-request intros. It was horrible, awkward and unethical from my perspective. 

 

Right when I decided to get into finance I needed an internship ASAP to start building my resume. I got connected to NM through a random guy I met in PWM
 

I read WSO the day before the interview so I was already tipped off (thank freaking goodness)


Interview went as follows:

- Asked me my name

- Told me about the company

- Said they teach you to invest, may even pay for your CFA or something (it’s been a while since the interview so this is fuzzy)

- DEFINITELY said they outperform the market more than any other investment manager (this sketched me out and tipped me off to them being scammy, just like WSO said)

then

- Told me about their “project 200.” Your very first task is to fill out 200 names of people you can sell life insurance to. They want you to put down your mom, uncle, brother, cousin, professor, friend, basically anyone.... they asked me if I wanted to continue on and sign for the “internship”

- FYI their bread and butter is the kind of insurance that screws people over (you pay an exorbitant amount so they can “invest” a little bit of the monthly fee). Remember kids, “buy term insurance and invest the rest yourself”

- Promptly told them I wasn’t interested but I thanked them for letting me practice my interviewing skills 

About 2-3 weeks later I landed an internship at a local boutique bank that got me far further than anything else. It’s not worth it to go to these resume fillers like Northwestern Mutual; it’s a waste of space and I guarantee you’ll regret having it on your res.

 

I regret not doing it as a freshman. It's sales, so people who are naturally risk-averse (a.k.a 99% of the people on this forum trashing the program) are going to hate on it regardless. I think it's a good internship as a first or second year especially if you can close any meaningful deals that serves as a nice talking point. It's better than waiting tables or some other bullshit like that. 

 

Romero Capital. People will say on their linkedin how they worked on DCF and LBO but in actuality this is a pay-to-play internship. https://www.romerocapital.com/team That's a link to the company website, but here is a link to the pay-to-pay internship portion https://romeromentoring.com/analyst-prep-program/.

Here's a link to a wso thread about it https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/romero-mentoring-analyst-program

 

Selby jennings isn't technically a scam. From what I've seen, they make IB job postings on websites like linkedin and it looks like a bank at first, but it's just a recruiting website. Then you submit your resume to random job postings. Definitely misleading, but from my experience, not a scam.

Not sure if you're referring to Aleutian capital instead of Atleutian capital, but I wouldn't say that's a scam either. From my knowledge, they are more of a business broker than an i bank (checked their listings while working with a search fund) but not sure where ur coming from on that one. 

 

Have you ever spoke with a Selby Jennings professional? They are the most tone deaf people I ever spoke with. Also they spammed my resume without consent. I would interview with firms only to hear that my resume has been pushed already...

 

Damn. Then you are out of the loop monkey. Just type Tobin in the search bar and see if you can find out. Tobin deleted her comments when she was sh!tt!ng on WSO and monkey's, while talking up her unpaid internships. 

 

I would definitely take AXA Advisors/Equitable off the list. I interned there freshman and sophomore year.

Got a great hourly wage, Never paid a penny, got great experience doing fun and interesting work.

And with that as my leading experince on my resume I just landed a Wall Street IB role.

***Granted I did work independently for an advisor rather than for there corporate office***

 

Can anyone elaborate on JUMP investors ? Have an interview coming up with them. Seems like unpaid sweaty work but would love some clarification

 

I've dealt with some of these companies, and it was an unpleasant experience. It's funny when a company asks you to pay for the internship, so it was pretty suspicious for me. But these companies tend to scam not only the potential employers but other companies as well. My father is the owner of a small business, and he was almost scammed by one of the financial companies. And after this situation, my father has implemented anti-fraud software from covery.ai to prevent such cases in the future. I think more companies should implement such software for their good.

 

Lmao if you wanna go in on your first day and write out your contacts list and proceed to sell them life insurance go ahead northwestern mutual way.

 

One firm in Europe to watch out for is Candesic. It's unfair to say they're a scam, but have some dodgy practices. Firstly, as an "intern" you do not get a contract and have to report how much you worked in hours in order to get paid a fixed amount per hour. Additionally, their business model is predominantly focused on having a couple of true full-time consultants and cycling through dozens of analysts to do all the grunt work on their CDD deals with only a fraction staying on as FT. Besides this, full-time hires are legit, their get paid a bit below competitors in the space and have decent exit opportunities. It's one of those places that you would take if you have absolutely no other option. 

 

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