Showing posts with label colonyinvest. Show all posts
Showing posts with label colonyinvest. Show all posts

Monday, January 23, 2012

Criminal suits against ColonyInvest and Blue Ocean Siam

According to a report from Nov 11, 2010 in the Nation (Bangkok), the Department of Special Investigation (DSI) filed cases against two pyramid schemes, one the ominous Colony Invest (colonyinvest), see the report.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

ColonyInvest closed down, people loose millions in Thailand/Vietnam

Police have moved in on the ColonyInvest fraudsters, the Nation, Bangkok, reports. Many people have lost millions of baht in this fraudulent pyramid scheme. See The Nation.
Also in Vietnam people have been cheated out of Billions of VND by the pyramid scheme. Police have arrested 15 people. See Thanhnien News.com.

We have warned here against ColonyInvest since June 2007.
This just serves as a reminder that all these schemes that promise exceedingly high interest rates, these so-called HYIPs, are fraudulent. While they may pay some money in the beginning, this money comes from other investors, and not from proper investments, which never have such high rates of interest. The whole thing just collapses whenever the mastermind decides to run away with the money.

Thursday, August 9, 2007

More shady dealings of colonyinvest in Vietnam, part5

A Vietnamese newspaper tracked down the local representative of colonyinvest. See their article at
www.thanhniennews.com/features/?catid=10&newsid=30717.
How shady is it for a supposedly reputable business with investments yielding 100 percent gains per month to distribute info in a photocopy shop?! And to meet a representative of colony investment the newspaper had to go to a coffee shop. It is also very revealing that the colonyinvest representative claims that they get their money from investments in casinos, foreign exchange, and normal stock markets (high-tech/blue-chip). This clearly shows that this business cannot be legitimate, since, for example, no deals in foreign exchange currencies can yield such profits. It is very clear however, that the top colonyinvest representatives at this meeting get their money from the investment of other people. The normal “investor” is left with e-money that supposedly increases in a computer account. The real problem will start when they want to withdraw some real money… Tellingly, when the journalists wanted to borrow some e-money, the colonyinvest representatives said “no”. If Colony Invest can generate money so easily with their scheme, why can’t they lend a little e-money? Clearly, this is all about cheating people out of their real money. Stay away from this fraud!

Thursday, August 2, 2007

Colony Invest fraud moves around, part4

Colony Invest (colonyinvest) operates also at colonyinvest.net. Their other - identicial - web site, www.colonyinvest.com, is presently not responsive. No reputable company would keep their ".com" down or inactive. They could reroute to the other. Perhaps they are on the move to hide from old investors.
Also, it seems they moved their blog entry to colonythailand.blogspot.com to attract Thai people into their scam. Colonythailand is the same fraud! They also have a web site geared towards Vietnamese at http://music.easyvn.com/colonyinvest/. The contact person associated with this Web site is a Nguyen Kinh Luan. It has a nice description of their pyramid scheme:



As one can see, this is a rather overcomplicated scheme, nobody is really supposed to understand the details, all that matters is that it promises extra percentages of profit for each new member that you can recruit. No investment company would offer such a pyramid scheme. In fact Colony Invest is both a pyramid and Ponzi scheme. This is illegal and does not work (see for example the Wikipedia entries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme).

Perhaps some people will get some money, but most will loose. Do not invest!

Monday, June 11, 2007

Colonyinvest Fraud, part3

Well, each time you look at that site, you just find more lies. The testimonials are all written in poor English, definitively not by a native English speaker. Further, this testimonial says they used this company for 6 months! What a lie. If you look in my first post, you will see that the Web site is up only since the middle of March 2007.

Forget these fraudsters...

Thursday, June 7, 2007

Colonyinvest Fraud, part2

Colonyinvest is even running their own blog here on blogspot (or at least used to). Does it surprise me that they only have one post, advertising their schemes? Of course not.

At least this gives us the opportunity to look at their claims.


So, for 1000$ investment, at 3% interest per day put into a separte account, you get 1000$ in 33 days. You are supposed to gain 3000$ to 4000$ (it's not quite clear how this strange scheme is counting) in the short time of 100 days. Impossible with the investment sources (stock market, commodities) they cite on their Web page.
They clearly want to cheat unsuspecting people from SouthEast Asia. They offer low investment limits (just 100$ gets you started), and they have a strange online keyboard for entering information. This only makes sense if one thinks about possible entry problems caused by keyboards and alphabets in different countries.
They want to lure as many people as possible in a short time, therefore the network and friend-to-friend bonuses. Clearly this is an illegal pyramid scheme.

www.colonyinvest.com could be shut down any moment, and the only one who profits is the Web operator who collected all the money. Perhaps he will pay out some interest to the first investors to generate a positive feedback, and keep the money coming in, but at some point, this Web site and the money will just disappear. Since this seems to have started in April, it could stop any day.
Again, just keep away from such sites.

Saturday, June 2, 2007

Scam Investment Schemes: ColonyInvest part1

There are plenty of fraudulent investment schemes out there. If a scheme sounds too good to be true, well, indeed, it's probably not true. Artists against 419 (419 is also known as Nigerian fraud) has a database of fake Banks (http://db.aa419.org/). Alas, this list is not complete, new schemes pop up all the time.
Let's have a look at a recent scheme: www.colonyinvest.com.

Can this be real? They apparently advertise their business mainly on Asian webboards (e.g. Malaysia), and seem to rely on word to word propaganda to sign up people, apparently in a pyramid scheme.
So, let's examine the Web site. The "About Us" section:



They claim to be the online investment branch of a major Investment company "Colony Invest Management Inc. ".
Web searches do not reveal any company by that name. Further, they are supposed to be based in Rochester, NY, but a check in the list of supervised institutions at the "State of NY Banking Department" http://www.banking.state.ny.us/supinst.htm" does not reveal any such company.
Most revealing is that nowhere in the Web site is any real adress or phone number listed. Highly suspicious.
Look at the supposed list of directors, many of the places they supposedly worked at cannot be found on the internet:
Estine Development Group, London Tucks Development Agency, Smith Simpson College, Barbra Capital Partners, Clinton, Dubbier & Rice, Inc. There is a "Simpson College" without "Smith", but why should a "reputable" company make such a mistake... Anyway, this whole list is just made up to look impressive.

What about the links to the companies they invest in, the references? You will notice that these are just links to other Web Sites, and none of these other Web Site ever mention or link back to ColonyInvest.

So, where is the Web site registered? A search on http://www.whois.net/ brings us to the registrar godaddy.com (where you can register a web site for 10$ a year). The information there yields:



Wow, a single person in Fremont California (whatever happened to Rochester, NY?) is listed as administrator and technical expert, and he has a yahoo email address in China! How fishy is that?
A reverse lookup of the phone number at http://www.whitepages.com/ gives us the following information for the same phone number:



Ibi synergy (http://www.ibisynergy.com/) is an importer of condoms for NR Synergy in Malaysia. This seems to be a little legitimate business. You can make another lookup for this Web address and find another owner listed for this phone number. But clearly, this is very different from what ColonyInvest is supposed to be.

Finally, let's look at some of the fine print of ColonyInvest. In their FAQ:

To deposit money into an account of theirs, they charge 5%!. To withdraw money, they charge 10%. So, according to the example given, you deposit 1075$, and when you want to withdraw it later, you get 860$ back. So, together with fees, they take 20% of your money, what a rip-off. No reputable bank will do that. And nowhere do they promise you any garanteed profits... For each transaction in the market they charge you 50$. A search for "online banking" will give you many online banks that allow you stock market trading for less than 10$ per transaction.

So, in conclusion, just stay away...