Who would have thought that investing in Iraqi currency wouldn’t be the safest place to put the kids’ college fund.
A recent consumer alert from the Cleveland Better Business Bureau cautions against buying Iraqi Dinars from the Chicago-based company United World Exchange, citing cases nationwide in which people who purchased Dinars from the web site never received the goods. One man from central Ohio, a soldier currently fighting in Iraq, bought one million Dinars from the company for $1,130. Three weeks later, his mailbox was still empty.
Turns out, United World Exchange isn’t the only fly-by-night Dinar dealer out there, promising returns beyond your wildest dreams. But even if you find a reputable company to go through, stocking up on Iraqi cash is about as safe as betting your life-savings on Britney Spears’ hairdo.
Sure, the Dinar’s value is so depressed (about .0008 U.S. Dollars) that if it goes up just by a few pennies, you could wind up a millionaire. Unfortunately, at the rate things are going, it looks like the Iraqi people might just scrap the Dinar altogether and start trading in bootleg copies of Apocalypto. Click here for a real financial analyst’s take on investing in chaos. — Jared Klaus
This article appears in Feb 21-27, 2007.