Greed makes man blind and foolish, and makes him an easy prey for death. - Rumi
I've always wanted to write about this scheme called CFG Football investment, the Malaysian company behind it is supposedly CFD Football Sdn Bhd. This musical chair pyramid scheme was getting viral mid year of 2021 during the covid19 pandemic. With the pandemic either people had too much money saved or those who were looking for more avenues to make easy money joined this scheme. Many of my friends join it and were introducing me to this system. They were raving about how much money they were making through the app just by placing bets on football matches that were recommended by the app through the app itself.
The app was promoted by many influencers and via friend to friend referral. Referees were given rewards for introducing people into the app. The people behind it also had several YouTube video's done to make the app more legit.
The main story behind the scheme is that it is used to do football betting and punters can buy insurance to cover their losses. However the way people earn most money from it seems to be from recruiting members (get referral fees) and earning daily interests on their deposits. The scheme is quite elaborately thought out with very nicely done website and backend system, upline and downline reward plans and premium packages (pay RM10k for enhanced returns).
Deposits to the system were made to bank accounts directly (eg Maybank CIMB) or using crypto stable coin USDT aka Tether. USDT is a cryptocurrency supposedly tied to the price of US dollar, its price fluctuations mirrors the ups and downs of the US dollar. Compounding the fact USDT is a cryptocurrency, it offers some form of anonymity. As such, USDT was favored method of deposit and withdrawals. USDT can be purchased via cryptocurrency exchanges like Huobi and Binance. Interestingly there are reports that USDT is also a fraud because it was found that it was not backed by real US Dollars exposed by Coffeezilla (Youtube scam exposure avengelist) and Jordan Belfort (Wolf of Wall Street). One red flag for this scheme also is cash deposits were also done via 3rd party accounts which could be used as mule accounts for those not IT savvy to buy USDT tokens.
Just as any money game Ponzi scams out there, initially depositors could withdraw their money/earnings and start to gain trust on the platform/app. Out of sudden on 17 January 2022, the people behind it (CFG Football Investment) decided to pull the rug and depositors were denied withdrawal.
There's now around 3 variations what CFG Football is facing based on what was communicated by their different lieutenants (company spokespersons) :
1. The company is being pursued by the tax authorities and a huge settlement has been reached and depositors must in turn pay 8% tax (using USDT) in order to access back their funds.
2. The company is being bombarded by too many requests until it needs to close down temporary until 24/1/2022.
3. The company is being investigated by the law enforcement agencies as a result of mass crackdown on illegal football betting sites.
While is scam is not as big as the previous JJPTR (JJ Poor to Rich) scam, the organizers definitely ran away with millions of depositor's money. Also, while the face of JJPTR Johnson Lee was known and subsequently arrested, the people behind CFG Football Investment is still unknown and their whereabouts are still at large. Interestingly, a lot of the depositors are aware that this a Ponzi scheme but decided to deposit their money into the system (they use USDT) hoping to get in the game early to get high profit returns. The scheme spans beyond Malaysia, to Indonesia and Philippines. I've also seen many Nepali citizens working in Malaysia involved in it, all of them now lamenting about their losses after this incident.
As an example below, one of the CFG users mention that she turn RM200 in RM500 within 28 days which is a 150% returns. Nobody even the best hedge fund managers in the world gets this kind of returns. With such good returns, the hedge funds might as well park their funds into CFG football. Early payments was given with high interest to allow people to trust the scheme is legit.
In my personal opinion, even if CFG Football Investment is legit , I do not think CFG Football Investment will be back as even if the company can get itself back, all the incoming withdrawal requests will collapse back the company like a balloon being released of its air. In addition, the number of police reports being raised on the scheme is likely going to draw in attention of the police at Bukit Aman and in the event the company accounts are freezer for investigation, every depositor's money will be stuck.
Take a legitimate bank like Maybank for example, if one day a large number of the bank's depositors suddenly demand for withdrawals, the bank would also collapse as they operate on fractional reserve banking system where only a fraction of bank deposits are backed by actual cash on hand and available for withdrawal.
I previously resisted writing about it as many friends were boasting about how much they made on this platform just by doing the football bets and introducing friends. This is not the end of such schemes as just like the mythical hydra, many clone sites will pop up to offer such a money game for people desperate to make money in this low interest rate environment (eg 1B1D,888Ball, 365Ball, LFC,MUFC,FCB3,888Ball,MFC,BWin,TFC). The mainstream media is also partly responsible for this as they always label these schemes as investment platform (illegal or legal) giving it the impression it is an alternative investment platform (ζθ΅εΉ³ε°) for people.
I only decided to write it after getting confirmation from many sources that this Ponzi scheme has collapsed, the main website is showing a maintenance screen and withdrawals have been blocked.. My parting words for this post is for everyone to stay safe and stay hungry but don't get greedy, when things are too good to be true, it's always a self fulfilling prophecy.
πLinks
https://forum.lowyat.net/topic/5229826
https://www.getrichkopitiam.com/jjptr-forex-scam/
#cfgfootball #cfgmalaysia