EN
We recently received a request from the owner of Investfundsonline.com to have their business verified so that the site can be awarded a higher Trust Score on ScamAdviser.com. At the time of writing this article, Investfundsonline.com has a low Trust Score of 13/100 and a suspicious pattern of reviews was detected, indicating that the site may be untrustworthy.
When I began manually researching the website to know whether it is legit or a scam, a number of warning signs were noted that suggested Investfundsonline may be a fraudulent investment scheme. Most shocking of all is the fact that the Investfundsonline is registered with the Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC) as IFO GROUP PTY LTD (ACN: 655 999 590) despite the high risks it poses to investors.
According to Wikipedia, “The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) is an independent commission of the Australian Government tasked as the national corporate regulator. ASIC's role is to regulate company and financial services and enforce laws to protect Australian consumers, investors and creditors.”
However, delving further into the business model and offerings of Investfundsonline revealed that ASIC may be failing in its core purpose of helping keep consumers safe from financial fraud as the company’s ASIC registration plays a huge part in convincing investors that they will not be duped. We contacted ASIC several times seeking to know how such a company was able to get registered but received no reply. Read on to know why it is concerning that Investfundsonline was able to obtain an ASIC registration.
Investfundsonline calls itself an ‘investment company’ and claims to generate profits for investors by trading stocks and cryptocurrencies.
It offers three investment plans which are curiously referred to as ‘products’. The minimum deposit amounts are just $25 to $100 but incredible returns of 1.17% to 0.91% daily are being promised.
Firstly, bigger returns being offered for small deposits is the opposite of what is seen in most genuine investment opportunities, as a higher investment amount generally provides a higher return on investment (ROI).
The reason that Investfundsonline calls its investment plans ‘products’ seems to be that it is trying to pass off as a Multi-level Marketing (MLM) company. While MLM is a legitimate and legal business model, we have previously warned about MLM Scams which are fraudulent schemes operating under the false guise of legality. While legal MLM firms have a tangible product or service, Investfundsonline only offers investment packages with no product or service behind them, making it more akin to a pyramid scheme than an MLM.
As I dove deeper, I saw several more signs that Investfundsonline may covertly be a pyramid scheme. It refers to investors as ‘distributors’ and has a huge focus on team building which is often a euphemism for creating a downline.
On top of the ludicrous ROI being promised from the purchase of ‘products’, Investfundsonline also has a major focus on creating an ‘affiliate network’, which is nothing but a downline. Investfundsonline has an 8-tier referral commission system that rewards investors with up to 24% additional returns when their referrals make a deposit. Referral commissions are the signature tactic of pyramid schemes.
Trust in a company comes from various things, among which one of the most important is the company’s leadership. Naturally, this raises the question about the management team of Investfundsonline. Is it run by trustworthy individuals?
The public face of Investfundsonline is someone named ‘Thomas Lyons’ who is supposedly the company's CEO. This name is mentioned in the domain registration information too.
In the above screenshot, the registrant’s address is given as ‘Lang Road 96’. This address is not mentioned on the website itself and when I looked it up, I found that it is a residential address. As a company CEO would never give their personal address to register a company domain, it seems that the address is likely unrelated to Investfundsonline.
Coming back to Thomas Lyons, it is suspicious that no information about him exists anywhere on the internet. Thomas does not even have a LinkedIn profile. In fact, no real employees of Investfundsonline can be found on LinkedIn.
Thomas Lyons can be seen and heard speaking in a video titled ‘Thomas Lyons CEO IFO’ on Investfundsonline’s YouTube channel. Even though Investfundsonline is supposedly an Australian company, Thomas Lyons clearly does not have an Australian accent. Therefore, there is a possibility that Thomas Lyons may be a paid actor and not the actual CEO of Investfundsonline.
Another contradiction is found in Investfundsonline’s video titled ‘Mike Collins Trader IFO’. In this video, someone called ‘Mike Collins’ states that he has been trading on Investfundsonline since 2019.
However, there is no evidence of Investfundsonline existing before December 2021. In fact, snapshots from the Internet Archive show that Investfundsonline’s did not start operating before March or April 2022. Take a look at the below snapshots from December 2021 and April 2022.
Investfundsonline’s own website clearly states that the company was registered only in December 2021, contradicting Mike Collins’ claim of using the platform since 2019. Therefore, it seems that Mike Collins may be a paid actor too.
As with most MLMs and Pyramid Schemes, online reviews of Investfundsonline are overwhelmingly positive as ‘investors’ are incentivized to promote the platform in order to gain referral benefits. For example, Investfundsonline has a 100% 5-star rating on Trustpilot, but looking closely at the reviews reveals that they include signature signs of pyramid schemes such as referral links, promises of ‘passive income’ and blind optimism.
Even though Investfundsonline tries to portray that it is operating since December 2021, it seems that the site has only gone live around March 2022. The earliest reviews for Investfundsonline were written on March 21st, 2022 and are in Russian. This indicates that Investfundsonline could be a pyramid scheme originating from Russia.
Due to the reasons mentioned in this article, it is alarming to see that the Australian Securities & Investments Commission is putting consumers at risk by awarding registrations to companies that do not pass even the simplest ‘smell test’.
In fairness, an AFS license is required for any business providing financial services to operate in Australia, which Investfundsonline does not seem to have. However, the fact that they have a genuine ASIC registration and portray the company as an MLM is enough to sway the minds of consumers who end up investing hard-earned money into potentially unsustainable and fraudulent investment schemes.
