By Kathy Chu, USA TODAY
With oil prices exceeding $70 a barrel, investors looking to make a quick buck are losing millions of dollars to sham oil and gas investments.

Typically, these deals involve scamsters who assure investors they can profit from high energy prices by investing in oil wells, for example, or alternative energy sources. State and federal regulators say that while some such investments are legitimate, others are mostly lures used by fraudsters to rip people off.

Stephen Glain, Newsweek International
Why are oil prices so high? Partly because the industry is dominated by incompetent monopolies.
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Remember the giant companies that once dominated the world oil market as the Seven Sisters? Of course, they have long since been expelled as owners from the Middle East to Mexico, and must now beg and barter for access to oil. The majority stake in world oil reserves that they held is now in the hands of nation-states. The result is a critically important anomaly: a vast global free market for oil, in which all the power players are nationalized, often highly inefficient state monopolies. One might call them the Seven (Or So) Sovereigns.