What to Do If You Suspect Oil and Gas Investment Fraud

The first steps that protect your claim — and the mistakes that quietly destroy it.

Maybe the distribution checks stopped and the explanations started. Maybe a promised well report never arrived, the salesman’s phone goes to voicemail, or something on the Firm’s Warning Signs page read like your own investment. Whatever brought you here, this page covers what to do next — in order — and, just as importantly, what not to do. The Firm has represented more than 210 defrauded investors since 2007, and the difference between strong recoveries and painful ones is very often decided in these first days.

First: What Not to Do

Before the steps, the mistakes — because well-meaning instincts destroy more claims than promoters do.

• Don’t confront the promoter with accusations. The moment a promoter believes litigation is coming, documents get harder to obtain, stories get coordinated, and assets may start moving. You gain nothing by announcing your suspicions, and you may forfeit the element that makes fraud cases winnable: a record built before the other side starts managing it.
• Don’t sign anything new. Suspicious investors are routinely offered paperwork: a “restructuring” of the program, a rollover into a promising new well, a partial payment accompanied by a release. Some of those documents are drafted for one purpose — extinguishing your claims. Nothing gets signed until a lawyer has read it.
• Don’t invest another dollar to “protect your position.” The follow-on ask is a classic move: the well needs a workover, the program needs more funding, we discovered too much water in the well, or some equipment broke down and your existing investment will be lost unless you participate. Money sent to rescue a fraudulent investment follows it.
• Don’t post about it publicly. Online accusations can complicate your case, tip off the promoter, and create defamation exposure while proving nothing. Tell your lawyer, not the internet.
• Don’t alter, organize away, or discard anything. Even documents that seem embarrassing or irrelevant — the enthusiastic emails you sent, the notes where you believed the pitch — are part of the record, and the record is your case. Preservation beats presentation.

The Steps, In Order

Step One: Preserve Everything

Gather and secure every document connected to the investment: the offering materials and private placement memorandum, subscription agreements, well reports and engineering summaries, joint interest billings and distribution statements, bank and wire records showing your payments, and every piece of correspondence — emails, letters, text messages, even voicemails, which can be saved before they expire. Preserve the digital originals, not just printouts: forward nothing, delete nothing, and keep emails in the account where they arrived, because dates, senders, and attachments carry evidentiary weight of their own. Then write a timeline while memory is fresh: who contacted you, when, what was said on each call, what was promised. In fraud litigation, contemporaneous notes of oral representations can matter enormously, because the strongest lies are often the ones the promoter was careful never to put in writing.

Step Two: Stop the Bleeding

Make no further payments into the program, decline the rescue offers described above, and be alert to a second predator: recovery scams. Fraud victims’ names circulate on their own lead lists, and investors who lost money to one scheme are systematically targeted by “asset recovery specialists,” fake regulators, and “class action coordinators” demanding fees up front to retrieve the losses. Legitimate recovery runs through counsel you chose and vetted — never through someone who called you.

Step Three: Verify Quietly

Without alerting the promoter, test the story against records the promoter does not control: the Texas Railroad Commission’s public well files (permits, completions, actual production volumes), and registration records at the Texas State Securities Board and the SEC, and entity filings at the Secretary of State. The Firm’s Warning Signs page walks through these checks in detail. You are not building the legal case yourself — that comes next — but even a quick look often converts “I have a bad feeling” into “the well they described was plugged two years before I invested,” and that clarity matters for the decision ahead.

Step Four: Mind the Clock

Limitations periods apply to fraud claims, and the safest course is to act within three years of the sale — some claims may extend to four, but waiting to find out which applies to you is a gamble with your own money. The practical clock runs faster still: witnesses scatter, documents disappear, and above all, collectability decays — the promoter’s assets are easiest to reach before the scheme’s other investors, creditors, and regulators converge on them. In these cases, early movers recover from assets; late movers recover from what’s left.

Step Five: Get a Professional Case Review

Send what you preserved — in whatever condition it’s in — to a free, confidential consultation. You will get a candid assessment: whether the facts suggest fraud, which remedies may be available, what the obstacles are, whether the likely defendants have assets worth pursuing, and whether the claim makes economic sense — before you commit to anything. If the honest answer is that you have a loss but not a case, or a case but no collectable defendant, you will hear that too. An incomplete pile of documents today is worth far more than a perfect file after the limitations clock has run.

If Family or Friends Invested With You

Fraudulent programs spread through trust: many investors, on the strength of early “production checks,” referred people close to them into the same scheme — and the guilt of that referral keeps more victims silent than any threat a promoter could make. Set the guilt aside; it belongs to the person who built the deception, and silence only serves him. Practically, a group of defrauded investors is often stronger than one: coordinated multi-plaintiff litigation shares costs, unifies the record, and presents the court with a pattern no single case can show — the Firm’s ten-plaintiff securities fraud matter, won on summary judgment in Dallas County, is exactly that model. If others invested alongside you, tell them what you have learned, encourage them to preserve their documents, and raise the group question at the case review.

Reporting to Regulators — and Why It’s Not Enough Alone

Suspected securities fraud can be reported to the Texas State Securities Board and the SEC, and reporting is usually worth doing: regulators can investigate, sanction, and sometimes freeze assets. But understand their mission — enforcement, not your recovery. A regulatory action can shut a scheme down without returning your individual investment; that is what your private claim is for. The two tracks work best coordinated, and in the right order for your facts, which is exactly the kind of judgment the case review provides.

What Recovery Can Look Like

Depending on the facts and the claims, remedies may include rescission — unwinding the investment — or damages measured by the investment less any revenue received, plus interest and attorney’s fees where the law provides them, and exemplary damages where the evidence supports them. Where a scheme has collapsed into a court-appointed receivership or bankruptcy, recovery typically flows through that proceeding — it could take a year as assets are marshaled and distributed — and having counsel inside the process protects your claim and identifies defendants outside it. And where judgment is obtained, the work continues into collection, because a judgment that is never collected does not make you whole.

No lawyer can promise an outcome, and this Firm will not. What can be promised is the method: a case built on documents, prepared — where the record allows — to be decided on summary judgment, with a candid assessment at every stage of what your claim is realistically worth. That method has recovered substantial sums for defrauded investors for nearly two decades, and it begins working the day you make the call.

Frequently Asked Questions

Contact Mark A. Alexander, P.C.

We welcome the opportunity to discuss your legal issue.

Mark A. Alexander, P.C.

The Gild
8150 North Central Expressway, 10th Floor
Dallas, Texas 75206
Phone: (972) 544-6968
Fax: (972) 421-1500

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