How to Avoid Offshore Asset Protection Scams

Filed under: offshore

Detailing the most commonly encountered offshore asset protection scams and how to avoid them:

Asset protection as a concept is very simple – you place valuable assets such as property, cash or even your business outside the reach of potential creditors or litigants.  To enable you to do so you can physically place assets offshore or you can create some form of legal structure such as a trust to hold the assets for example; but actually taking the most appropriate action for the protection of your own personal assets is a very complex undertaking that requires specialist legal, financial and taxation assistance. ou might not think that this is the case however, because if you look online you’ll see a whole host of so called asset protection solutions available to you – some of which you can even buy same day, off the shelf! 

In actual fact such solutions are liable to strip your assets in terms of the capital you have to lay out to purchase them, and they may even be illegal or at least unsuitable for your own requirements.  In this article we’ll have a look at how to avoid the most obvious offshore asset protection scams because there are a lot of them out there.

The very first point that needs to be made is that asset protection as a concept is legitimate and can be appropriate for many people.  However, the way you as an individual go about handling your familial, fiscal and business affairs is a very personal choice dictated by a series of intimate factors relating exclusively to you and your circumstances, which is why you should not enter into any decisions or take any action relating to the protection of your assets offshore or onshore without taking qualified legal, financial and taxation advice.

Another taxation false claim is that you will only pay tax if and when you remit income or bring assets back onshore. One way in which your adviser might suggest getting around the issue of something not being ‘legally achievable’ is through non-disclosure.  Some advice may be given along the lines of ‘what the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over’ – i.e., you may be advised not to tell your taxation authority about assets you hold offshore because they’ll never know and therefore never worry about it!

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