Regardless of Bushbaby's personal feel for the risk:
If you get ripped off, good luck. One of the biggests risks is that if you get taken, what will you do? The legal system? Like I said.
There's a reason they pay that interest rate. It's because they can't get lenders at a lower interest rate (else they would). Now why is that?
I like Mondongo's post. It is funny. "I have traded many times in the futures and options markets....there are NO guarantees there...no packages that promise you anything...."
Anybody can promise or say they guarantee this or that.
OK, give me US$1 million and I promise, no, I "guarantee" I'll pay it back within 30 days with 50% intererest. It's going towards my company, which needs money and has shown a profit and 20% growth every year for the last 10 years, and it has paid every investor exactly what they were promised!
My accountant (actually any accountant worth their salt) can provide private investors a high rate of return on short term cash loans. I've done a few myself.
There's a reason they don't borrow from the bank backed by sufficcient assets at typical rates. Could be legal reasons, could be a divorce, could be bad credit, could be their assets aren't worth as much as they claim or are nearly impossible to unload should the need come to that.
USA resident investment experts: Go get a mortgage on your house at 6%. What? You don't own a house with high equity? This from the investment expert? Doesn't sound like you've been all that successful to me if you owe on your house. Oh, I see, it's already mortgaged and invested in high-yield instruments awaiting maturity, at which time you will simply reinvest in same, No reason to cash out when what works once will work 10 times.
The rates are set by the market value, and nobody is going to convince me the market value is over/under valued because to do so, is pure speculation. Either that or all the people whose job it is to know these things, that's right, the professionals, have been sleeping and somehow just don't know about the big money to be made in the "guaranteed" return on investment commercial paper in the Dominican Republic.
It's like playing hot potato, where as it is wound up and ticks and gets passed from one person to the next. It could stop ticking at any moment. Will it stop ticking while YOU are holding it? Probably not. But maybe. That's called RISK, which means it is NOT guaranteed.
A promise is not a guarantee. A guarantee isn't even a guarantee. Sufficient assets, a lien, the law, and a strong legal system are close to guarantees.