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Problem BFX-Investors.com

I am having an issue with a company

Wealth_Bulilder

Recruit
Messages
5
Has anyone heard of BFX-Investors.com?

They are a forex investment company based out of China. Their website seems legit. They show a phone number, physical address and their online chat with a customer service rep answered a gauntlet of questions from me. They are licensed/regulated by the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) and they claim their customers are fully insured.

An acquaintance of mine claims he's been using this company for a year with phenomenal returns (30-40% per month.) His account was doubled in the first 3 months...so he says. Again, this is only an acquaintance of mine and I don't know his character. He did share screen shots of his account in their online back office to show me his account.

Any help or comments would be greatly appreciated!
 
Your acquaintance must own a time machine. BFX-Investors.com was first registered on June 6, 2018, which is less than 2 months ago. Registering with them before that would have been very difficult.

You should ask the helpful customer service rep to send you a copy of their claimed CSRC license. If they do, then go straight to www.csrc.gov.cn/pub/csrc_en/ and ask them if the license is valid and applies to the offerings on the BFX-Investors website. You should also ask them for details of the insurance and check with the insurance company to verify the plan is valid.

Look at the promised rates of return. They vary from 40-60% a month. I can tell you that there is no safe and sure way to get those sorts of a return on a sustainable basis. If this isn't just a deposit-only scam, there are only a limited number of options of what it can be:

1. Grotesque exaggeration of returns.
2. Super-high risk trading that can wipe out accounts with no warning.
3 Some form of HYIP or Ponzi scheme.

Think about it. If you put in their minimum ($5000) and "only" got the minimum promised return (40% per month), in one year, you would have over $280,000. In 2 years, you would have over 16 million. In 3 years, you would have over 900 million. In 4 years, it would be over 51 billion. A few years later, you could buy yourself a gift using part of the money. Get something small, like the whole planet.

Ponzi schemes come in many forms and will say anything to get you to trust them. Good ones may even pay, but ever cent you make in profit (if you are lucky enough to get more than your initial investment out before it collapses) is stolen from other investors and has nothing to do with any special trading techniques. Read my article to learn more:

Ponzi Schemes and HYIPS - Free Money Traps

One other small note. Any company really operating out of Shanghai would know how to spell Beijing Road.
 
Your acquaintance must own a time machine. BFX-Investors.com was first registered on June 6, 2018, which is less than 2 months ago. Registering with them before that would have been very difficult.

Thank you for confirming what I had assumed. When I asked how they had been getting returns from BFX for a year when their domain for the site had only been registered for 56 days they said..."because BFX refreshes their domain every 6 months for security reasons." I told them that was just another red flag and I'm not interested.

Thanks for the laughs!! I think I will buy the world one of these days:)

And thank you for your detailed response so quickly. I am new to this site and my first experience was great. How do I go about flagging them as potential scammers?
 
Your acquaintance must own a time machine. BFX-Investors.com was first registered on June 6, 2018, which is less than 2 months ago. Registering with them before that would have been very difficult.

You should ask the helpful customer service rep to send you a copy of their claimed CSRC license. If they do, then go straight to www.csrc.gov.cn/pub/csrc_en/ and ask them if the license is valid and applies to the offerings on the BFX-Investors website. You should also ask them for details of the insurance and check with the insurance company to verify the plan is valid.

Look at the promised rates of return. They vary from 40-60% a month. I can tell you that there is no safe and sure way to get those sorts of a return on a sustainable basis. If this isn't just a deposit-only scam, there are only a limited number of options of what it can be:

1. Grotesque exaggeration of returns.
2. Super-high risk trading that can wipe out accounts with no warning.
3 Some form of HYIP or Ponzi scheme.

Think about it. If you put in their minimum ($5000) and "only" got the minimum promised return (40% per month), in one year, you would have over $280,000. In 2 years, you would have over 16 million. In 3 years, you would have over 900 million. In 4 year, it would be over 51 billion. A few years later, you could buy yourself a gift using part of the money. Get something small, like the whole planet.

Ponzi schemes come in many forms and will say anything to get you to trust them. Good ones may even pay, but ever cent you make in profit (if you are lucky enough to get more than your initial investment out before it collapses) is stolen from other investors and has nothing to do with any special trading techniques. Read my article to learn more:

Ponzi Schemes and HYIPS - Free Money Traps

One other small note. Any company really operating out of Shanghai would know how to spell Beijing Road.
To my surprise they actually sent me their license. I wasn't sure where to validate it on www.csrc.gov.cn/pub/csrc_en/ . Like you said though the math doesn't add up. They have to be robbing Peter to pay Pal...

upload_2018-8-2_20-22-16.png
 
That certificate is the funniest fake I've seen in months! It's more fake than the claimed returns. :D

Let's take this step by step:

1. They've only had the BFX-Investments.com website for 2 months, but have a much older license showing the same name. That makes no sense.

2. That Chinese license certainly has a ton of English on it, but not a single character of Chinese.

But wait. It gets better.

3. I googled the license number. I found this page:

http://secured.icmbrokers.com/mu/liveaccount/

Regulated by the Financial Services Commission (FSC) of the Republic of Mauritius, ICM Brokers has been issued a Category 1 Global Business License No. C113012569. Pursuant to Section 29 of the Securites Act 2005, ICM Brokers is licensed as an Investment Dealer in Currency Derivatives, Commodity Derivatives, and Equities.

It's not a Chinese license for BFX Investments It's really a Mauritius license belonging to another company that's been badly photoshopped.

4. Just to confirm this, I googled the name C. Louis-Planche, which is the signature in the lower-right corner to see if I could find a copy of an actual license with his signature.

I found one at kappabrokers.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/license_broker.pdf

Since PDFs can be a pain, I've converted it to jpg to make it easier to display.

license_broker.jpg


Notice any similarities? So, are we to believe that C. Louis-Planche really works for both the Mauritius FSC as well as the Chinese CSRC? Are we to believe that the CSRC modeled it's certificates on the ones used in Mauritius? Do we really believe the CSRC's logo looks almost exactly like the Mauritius FSC logo?


Unfortunately, I can't find an email on the CSRC's website. What you can do is report these people to the Mauritius FSC using the contact form at https://www.fscmauritius.org/en/others/contact-us and sending them a description of the fake license and a link to this page. If we're lucky, they'll slap up a warning against BFX-Investments.

From what you say, it sounds like your acquaintance is in on this scam. If he's local, have a chat with the fraud division of your local police department about the Ponzi scheme he's pushing. You can also share the link to this thread from your FaceBook or other social media pages to help spread the word that BFX-Investments is nothing but a cheap scam using a badly faked license to give itself credibility.
 
I'm going to follow through with these steps as my day allows.

The only thing they claimed is that they refresh their website domain every 6 months for security purposes. Which is why the certificate differs from the web domain origination. WHO DOES THAT??? NO ONE!

These guys are crooks...no doubt about it. They are not local, but rather in UK. A few of them show they went to the university of Toronto. The acquaintance has even went as far to get other investors on a FB messanger to tell me how wonderful it's been for them. Even go as far to send me screen shots of their accounts with BFX.

He gave me the name of his account manager (Scott Winslet...look him up!) who is said to be one of 17 professional traders with BFX. I went and connected with him on FB. From what I can tell they are all in on it. On FB they are all listed as being in real estate/entrepreneurs. The alleged pro trader says he's from Germany, but was contracted by BFX for 4 years to trade for them. However, his LinkedIn account says he's a real estate agent in Florida.

I really want to stick it to these pricks!!!
 
Get screenshots of everything, including every page in the site. There's a browser plugin called FireShot which can help. Scammers like this will twist and squirm, change their stories, and edit their websites. Archive.org is a good resource for older screenshots, but if you find any, save copies. There are ways for website owners to scrub information off of the archive.

Here's another incarnation of the same scam - fxtoptions.com

It's more or less the same site, complete with identical spelling errors.

Where to report them depends on what country you are in. For example, if you are in the USA, I suggest starting out by reporting them to www.CFTC.gov and www.IC3.gov For the UK, it would be the FCA and ActionFraud. Send them all the evidence you have.

No matter where you are, you can report them to www.eConsumer.gov (NOTE: If the US government shuts down over a budget fight, eConsumer is considered "non-essential" and will be temporarily offline.) This is also a great place to put all the screenshots and any other evidence, since eConsumer will share data with police and regulators around the world.

Since they are recruiting on FaceBook, drop a link to this discussion thread into any place you see them posting. You can also send the links as a conversation message to anyone who seems interested in their so-called investment. Do the same with links to my Ponzi/HYIP article.

Be ready to take some vicious backlash. I've been in threads at the FPA where a Ponzi ran for over a year. A mix of shills and "true believers" in the scheme did everything they could to claim I didn't know what I was talking about or that I was trying to draw investors away from the miraculous money plan they loved to somehow scam those people. Even after a Ponzi collapses, many participants will blame anyone who reported the scam to the authorities.
 
Get screenshots of everything, including every page in the site. There's a browser plugin called FireShot which can help. Scammers like this will twist and squirm, change their stories, and edit their websites. Archive.org is a good resource for older screenshots, but if you find any, save copies. There are ways for website owners to scrub information off of the archive.

Here's another incarnation of the same scam - fxtoptions.com

It's more or less the same site, complete with identical spelling errors.

Where to report them depends on what country you are in. For example, if you are in the USA, I suggest starting out by reporting them to www.CFTC.gov and www.IC3.gov For the UK, it would be the FCA and ActionFraud. Send them all the evidence you have.

No matter where you are, you can report them to www.eConsumer.gov (NOTE: If the US government shuts down over a budget fight, eConsumer is considered "non-essential" and will be temporarily offline.) This is also a great place to put all the screenshots and any other evidence, since eConsumer will share data with police and regulators around the world.

Since they are recruiting on FaceBook, drop a link to this discussion thread into any place you see them posting. You can also send the links as a conversation message to anyone who seems interested in their so-called investment. Do the same with links to my Ponzi/HYIP article.

Be ready to take some vicious backlash. I've been in threads at the FPA where a Ponzi ran for over a year. A mix of shills and "true believers" in the scheme did everything they could to claim I didn't know what I was talking about or that I was trying to draw investors away from the miraculous money plan they loved to somehow scam those people. Even after a Ponzi collapses, many participants will blame anyone who reported the scam to the authorities.
Here's the funny thing...In a group message I broke it all down to the 4 guys that were telling me how good the returns were for them. I shared screen shots of the fake certificate and 3 of them were telling me thank you and that they were getting their money out right away. One was just so sad that he had been part of a Ponzi for a year and never knew it...YEAH RIGHT! 4 out of 5 of these guys either live in Toronto or went to college at the University of Toronto. All 5 of these guys are in some type of real estate/entrepreneurs including the so called account manager/professional trader (who blocked me on FB now after I added him to the group message and asked him for his thoughts.

Thanks again for your help! Forex Peace Army is truly an amazing resource and you've be more than helpful!
 
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