This company name Red Rock Secured is a specialist providing precious metals IRA services to their customers. They make it possible to safeguard retirement assets by keeping them secure and protecting your downside with precious metals. This niche is very competitive, and there are lots of fraud companies within. How does Red Rock Secured match up to the rest of the industry?
After quickly looking at the company, it seems like they are pretty solid. Their rating on the Better Business Bureau is great and they even have rock solid reviews on Consumer Affairs. Believe it or not, this company is universally praised by its customers. So, what might actually go wrong?
You’ll have the shock of a lifetime once you realize what we learned. And you definitely need to read this information before sending them your hard-earned money.
IMPORTANT – before we get too far in this review, we’d like you to know we’ve vetted quite a few companies in this space.
We know that selecting a company to work with is a major financial decision and something not to take lightly. InvestingInGold.com has put in extensive research spanning many years in order to compile a list of the 5 highest recommended companies for this year.
==> See our #1 recommended company for precious metals investing
We urge you to view the links to see where Red Rock Secured stacks up against the competition.
Info about Red Rock Secured
Before we get into the specific details, I’d like to tell you more about the company itself and what they offer.
Believe it or not, this is a privately-owned company with headquarters in Southern California. Their overall goal is to provide their customers with education, secure products, and phenomenal customer service. They claim to be a company that values honesty and integrity above all else.
On their website, you’ll discover links to a number of pages containing customer reviews including pages to Trustpilot, the BBB, and the BCA.
They discuss honesty and integrity a lot and it seems very strange that they do. Why? Because the reviews that they link to on their website are all stakes. We’ll take a closer look at this in a minute.
Red Rock Values
This company does a lot of talking about their values and policies. They claim that their experts have the ability to teach everyone about the precious metals business. They also claim to give advice sharing the best strategies to improve your retirement portfolio. If you call the company, they supposedly offer insights in the best ways to personalize your goals while creating portfolio diversity.
They also claim to focus one of their biggest values on asset protection. They guarantee that if you use their products to invest, you will never lose all of its value in your portfolio. This is coming directly from them. They claim that your portfolio will never go down to zero. Technically, if you fund your gold IRA portfolio with $20,000, but one day it is suddenly only worth a dollar, they haven’t actually lied to you. But this doesn’t inspire a great deal of confidence nonetheless.
They claim that investing in precious metals is a high-risk opportunity but the reward is also high. Expand upon it by claiming to try to provide client protection to minimize customer risk. They make a strange assertion to say the least, since people tend to use precious metals to protect against the downside of stocks, bonds, and other investments.
Their educational databases are very large and anyone can access it on their website. They also provide customers with insight into the precious metals business, the history of their products, and they even shared knowledge about correctly diversifying a portfolio.
They say that customer care is the most important value that they possess. Seemingly, they say that they are more invested in the well-being of their customers as opposed to making cells. Unfortunately, during our investigation, we didn’t find this to be true. Even though they claim to be an honest, trustworthy, and communicative company. And they claim to believe that they are only successful once their clients become successful.
The other value that they claim to possess is portfolio diversification. They tell their customers that it’s wise to diversify their assets at all times to keep them well protected. They say the products they sell are excellent for diversity, though they never tell you why this is so.
Precious Metals IRA Services
Like a number of different companies, Red Rock Secured keeps their main focus on precious metals IRAs. You can use money slated for retirement to buy precious metals that are approved for the IRS and added to an individual retirement account. You must keep them stored at a facility licensed by the IRS, and all regulations and paperwork must also remain in compliance.
On occasion, this can get very overwhelming, which is why new investors have a hard time getting started. They find it difficult to pick a depository, custodian, and a gold broker. But this is the first step prior to even beginning the paperwork or setting up an account.
Red Rock Secured is a company designed to help you with all aspects of the IRA rollover process.
This company doesn’t provide a terrible amount of information on their website regarding the gold IRA account setup process. They want you to contact them via phone to learn more about it.
They claim to work with licensed IRA custodians. When you desire to open an account, you’ll initiate a 401(k) rollover to fund your new precious metals IRA.
A big red flag is that they try to call stocks uncertain paper investments. Obviously, stocks possess some risk, but they are far from uncertain investments even though it’s technically true. They want you to believe that investing in stocks is an incredibly risky proposition. Many investment experts recommend putting more of your money in stocks and only a small portion of your portfolio into precious metals.
Why? Investing in precious metals is a hedge against inflation and a potential stock market crash. But precious metals do not pay dividends, so if you’re looking for income, you should own a mix of precious metals and stocks.
After opening an account, they will supply you with an expert to help you make the best investment choices. This expert will offer insights into the right precious metals to meet your financial goals and they’ll offer real-world recommendations.
We have discovered evidence that their sales staff works on commissions. This is not a good thing for clients, because salespeople will try to push products on you for higher commissions. They will not take your best interest into consideration in many cases, which means you’ll end up spending money that you never should have on investments that you do not want or need.
Remember, as a gold IRA account holder you are in full control because it’s a self-directed IRA. No one is going to warn you when an investment is potentially negative. And if you lose money, this company will definitely wash their hands of you.
The Reality of IRS Loopholes
This company tries to claim that the IRS offers loopholes in their guidelines. These loopholes help IRA account holders get special benefits. In reality, there’s nothing special about gold IRA loopholes. This is basically how the IRA account tax codes work.
First, they claim a big loophole is penalty free asset transfers. You can convert stocks and bonds in the precious metals without an early withdrawal penalty. This is not a loop all but it’s the way things work normally. But it does imply that you should convert all of your stocks and bonds into precious metals, but this is something you should rather avoid.
They claim that privacy is also a loophole. They claim that IRS approved facility storage is the ultimate level of privacy. Guess what? You aren’t going to find too many licensed depositories in the United States. There are storage options in many general regions but they are few and far between.
They also want you to believe that your investments are completely private. This tries to convince people that they will not have to declare their earnings on their taxes, but this is far from true and completely absurd. You must follow all rules and regulations provided by the IRS and submit the correct paperwork. And when you take distributions, you can bet that you’re going to pay your taxes.
Gold IRA Storage
The company uses Lloyd’s of London to ensure all of their products. As we know, this insurance company is one of the top insurers of precious metals. They claim that if you convert all of your assets into precious metals that you aren’t at very low risk of being robbed or hacked. This is not a good plan.
Unfortunately, the company doesn’t tell us about storage or other fees. They claim that one of the company’s they work with is Kingdom Trust. Remember, custodians charge a separate maintenance and account setup fees, and many of these fees recur annually.
They never explain which storage facilities they work with either. Their wording is very vague and implies that you can even keep your precious metals stored at home for a gold IRA, which is patently untrue and illegal. You will get in a world of trouble and you’ll have to pay a fortune in fees and penalties if you get caught, so do not do it.
Rip-Off Alert: Is Red Rock a Scam?
At first blush, it doesn’t seem like this company has anything to hide. Their Better Business Bureau rating is an A+. And their reviews from customers are very positive and high-ranking. The same is true with their reviews on Consumer Affairs.
Here’s where things get a little skeptical:
On Trustlink, their average rating is 1.4 out of 5 stars. This is based on 49 existing reviews. In fact, one of their employees allegedly left a review saying that the company commits serious criminal misconduct.
They had previous reviews that were very positive from the past, yet those positive reviews were changed to a 1 star ranking. And then Trustlink added the phrase: THIS IS A FAKE REVIEW to the heading of each review.
More than likely, one of the previous employees wanted to expose the company because they schemed on unsuspecting people. No matter what, this drives a lot of skepticism about the company and puts them in serious doubt. Whether the reviews are legitimate or not is difficult to determine, so we’ll take a look at the previous employee and see what they had to say.
Allegations from a Previous Employee
On Trustlink, the employee opens with a complaint saying that they previously worked there and they were reviewing the company because they were performing fraudulent and dangerous practices that needed to be exposed.
In the complaint, they allege that the company charges huge commission fees in the amount of 50%-80%, and they intentionally mislead and defraud their customers. The employee even claims that they prey on senior citizens who get confused and persuaded by verbal contracts that they do not understand.
The former employee also tells us that they’ve been in the precious metal space for more than 10 years, but they never worked for a company as malicious and deceptive as this one. The sales reps use tactics that leverage 80% commissions from their customers.
Believe it or not, depending how this is initiated, this might not actually be fraud. It’s hard to tell if this company is actually performing criminal activities that are prosecutable based on the review. But the allegations seem very clear that commerce fraud, investment fraud and general financial crimes are taking place nonetheless.
The former employee also wants us to understand that there should be a current criminal investigation going on about the company, and their malicious preying upon senior citizens needs to be prosecuted. In the review, they even state that if you’ve ever done business with this company, you should meet with your legal counsel right away to recover potential financial losses.
The review claims that you should look at your final price that you paid and compare it to the market value of the products that you’ve purchased at that time. You might discover that you paid double or triple the actual market value of the product.
The former employee also wants this company to be held responsible and pay restitution to former customers for their wrongdoings. They even claim that the company treated them poorly when they were their employee and initiated harassment, wage theft, and other negative scenarios. But those complaints are going to be pursued in a different manner.
Here’s the resolution they hope for: that the company immediately compensate previous customers by restoring their original funds.
Red Rock Secured hasn’t attempted to respond to this complaint as of yet. They haven’t responded to customer reviews being altered, which means they might not even know this activity is happening. Then again, Trustlink may prevent them from deleting any potential wrongdoing on their part.
It’s certainly possible that a disgruntled employee was laid off and left his horribly negative review. But the fact that the company ignores it is a definite red flag on their part and they need to provide an explanation.
Plus, these fake reviews being exposed doesn’t bode very well for the company and they are difficult to explain. It’s very difficult to trust any reviews about this company at this point.
Whether the allegations are true or not, know that Red Rock Secured is a precious metals company that you should not do business with. There are many better companies to work with who have transparent fees, phenomenal and true customer reviews, and much cheaper prices.
Red Rock Secured Pros
- They have been in business for many years
- The business mostly seems legitimate
Red Rock Secured Cons
- The company was caught writing fake reviews on third-party websites in an effort to bury their negative reviews
- One major complaint from an ex-employee claims that they have seen malicious and repeated criminal fraud, especially against senior citizens
Bottom Line
In the traditional sense, this company isn’t necessarily a real scam. They may not have committed any fraudulent activities at all because we do not have proof. But we shouldn’t give them a pass either because they haven’t tried to refute these claims either.
Unfortunately, the biggest issue is the fake reviews that we exposed that they have written on Trustlink. On other trusted websites, they have excellent reviews, but learning about these fake reviews means that none of them can be trusted.
Plus, a previous employee says that this company has been committing criminally fraudulent acts against its customers for years and they believe you should seek legal counsel to get help.
Stay far away from Red Rock Secured if you’ve never worked with them before. Instead, choose another gold IRA company with a great reputation because you’ll be much better off in the long run.
About Tim Schmidt
Tim Schmidt is an Entrepreneur who has covered retirement investing since 2012. He's also a published author, and his views on investing have been featured in USA Today, Tech Times, The Huffington Post, Nasdaq, and many more.
