Inter-Web Global Fortunes is a scam and ‘investors’ will lose their money

BY GEORGE MANGENI: If you are invested with Inter-Web Global Fortunes Ltd, you will certainly lose money. It’s just a question of “when.” That’s why you have a lock-in contract. The best you can do is just hope that you are among the early investors…otherwise if you are a late entrant then rest assured your money is being used to pay off older investors. The fat lady is about to sing on your account. Typical Kenyan scams;

1. They are always registered under a business name, or even as a limited company…but quite involved in non-licensed businesses. Inter-Web is not licensed by CMA to do “forex trading” or whatever it is they are doing with people’s money. Which is not bad…most of the forex traders I know are not licensed by CMA. However if you are soliciting for funds from the public even through backdoor methods like referral networks, you need that CMA license because you become an entity of national interest due to holding the public’s cash.

2. They always promise unsustainable above-market returns; Inter-Web Global Fortune promises 20% per month…yet the average returns from mainstream asset classes are fractions of that and by mainstream asset classes I am referring to real estate (8% – 17% p.a. depending on location), stock market (10% – 25% p.a. depending on your choice of stocks for dividends and/or capital gains), T-Bills/Bonds, Unit trusts etc (6% – 13% p.a.). If Inter-Web have been really giving out these 20% per-month returns consistently for years since 2001, Kenya would certainly be boasting of several thousands of forex millionaires by now. Which is not quite the reality on ground. What are we all missing here? 240% return on capital annually and the company has been in existence since 2001 yet we have no known dollar millionaire from Inter-Web Global yet? How is that even possible?

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3. They always promote their sign-ups through a referral network; bring your friends and you will get a commission from their investment in the network. Inter-Wed Global Fortunes for instance gives 5% commission for any referral you bring in…and you get the 5% for the successive 6 months from the date the referral signs the agreement and puts in their first capital investment. Sorry to say this but the biggest victims of such scams are in most cases usually ladies; especially housewives, stay at home moms, the financially inferior groups who see nothing beyond the “high returns” shenanigans. Housewives have an unmatched way of spreading such news through suppressed “muchene” to their friends in their chamas, churches…any social gathering you can imagine. Money is power and power is money. In the end they all make rope in their friends who end up losing their money because they trusted them and they will never have answers because all they really wanted was just a commission and had no idea they were taking their friends and family savings to the guillotine. The saddest bit is that most of the proponents of scams never know they are scams until the tide runs out. Ekeza was a genuine business for years, so was Deci…so was VIP Portal. Even Madoff ran a genuine business for years before Harry Markopolos smoked him out after 9yrs of persistent poking and chasing.

4. They have no specific product…instead they sell you “packages” so depending on how much you “invest” with them, you get corresponding returns. Apart from being “Experts in Forex Trading,” Inter-Web Global also does offer training on forex trading. The irony is that most people who sign up to invest have no business learning how to trade forex so they rather give all their capital away to be traded on their behalf. After all, why bother learning how to trade when your teacher can trade for you instead? The cost of training to trade forex at Inter-Web Global Fortunes is Ksh. 100,000. But if you invest the Ksh. 100,000 with them so they trade for you, they will have it back to you with 100% return in 5 months. So why pay to train? This works greatly for their scam business model because with those returns, nobody will ever pay to get trained.

5. They lock your capital in the name of a contract. As far as I know at Inter-Web Global Fortunes a contract runs for 12 months (one year). In case you wish to pull out you can only get the capital back after a one-month advance notice of withdrawal. What this means is that the cons behind the scam have done their math and know that within that period they will have amassed enough cash to break even (yep…it’s a business of course so they have to hit BEP first before profits start locking in…driven by insatiable millions from fortune hunting Kenyans) and still make a killing off innocent Kenyans.

Interweb Global Fortunes is not a registered public forex trader for all I know; they are nowhere on CMA list of licensees. An ordinary Kenyan will walk around a supermarket looking for a product that’s Ksh. 5 less than the one on the previous shelf but will easily hand over hundreds of thousands to a stranger who promises “good returns” without even doing due diligence. Problem is we are always too greedy to see the reality; all we see is how rich we are going to get within a few months or a year, so that we can retire young. All it takes to pull off a scam like D9 Clube, Public Likes, Inter-Web Global etc. is just a link to easy money (could be laundered money from terrorism, drugs, human trafficking etc), start an above-average returns business model compaign, get someone on Kilimani Mums to share a screenshot, get word to the good muchene folks on social media and voila! a business is born. In a country where regulators are lax on scams, it’s no doubt we have these glaring scams promising heavenly returns walking naked right in front of us year in year out.

Hope the Capital Markets Authority acts before we have folks lining up at View Park Towers with their null contracts demanding their capital back from an unlicensed “Forex Trading Experts” company.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this feature on Inter-Web Global Fortunes are purely those of the writer.