Can’t Beat The Market? Beat Your Advisor

Lose a client’s money, what’s the worst that could happen? According to the U.K.’s Daily Mail, last week in Germany, elderly pensioners allegedly beat their financial advisor with Zimmer Frames (metal walkers) and then kidnapped him and tortured him for four days. He had lost them $2 million pounds (U.S. $3.3 million). The financial advisor, James Amburn, 56, says he was ambushed outside his home in Speyer, western Germany, bound with masking tape and bundled into the trunk of his client’s Audi 8.

Amburn’s harrowing tale is sure to surface in some glossy tell-all or on a D-list film set. Amburn tells the Mail, 'I had known these people for 25 years. I had no reason to be afraid. But as I went into my home I was jumped from the rear and struck. They bound me with masking tape until I looked like a mummy. It took them quite a while because they ran out of breath. When they loaded me into the car I thought I was a dead man. I was bleeding from my eyes, nose and my mouth. But the nightmare had only just started.’”

Amburn was then allegedly driven 300 miles to the Bavarian lakeside home of one of the assailants, where another couple, retired doctors, joined the kidnappers in the cellar where he was chained up and tortured for four days. ‘The fear of death was indescribable,’ Amburn said. During his confinement in an unheated cellar, Amburn says he was burned with cigarettes, beaten, and had two of his ribs broken when he was hit with a chair leg and chained up 'like an animal’, according to the story in the Mail.

Amburn supposedly told the blood thirsty geriatrics that if he “sold certain securities in Switzerland they could get their money and for this I had to send a fax to a bank in that country so funds could be transferred.’”Amburn was rescued when he sent a fax to release funds from a Swiss bank and scribbled a message on it for the receiver to call the police.