Rise and Fall of TFG Crowd. Brief History of Another P2P Ponzi Scheme.

Disclaimer: I haven’t been paid by any party to write this article. All the disscussed issues are based on my own, yet unfortunate experience investing with TFG Crowd.

Recent police investigations of Envestio and Kuetzal have shaken the P2P world. It turns out, P2P loans weren’t “safe” after all, and even industries’ golden standard, the magnificent “buyback guarantee”, couldn’t guarantee the full money recovery. This raises the logical question: which P2P platform will be the next P2P Ponzi scheme? There is some evidence suggesting that most likely it’s gonna be TFG Crowd. In this post, I would like to provide a brief history of how TFG Crowd evolved from a promising P2P lending platform to a shady business run by even shadier people.

Rise of TFG Crowd (Early 2019 — late 2019). Life was good if you were a TFG Crowd’s investor during this period. The newly established platform provided a variety of loans with generous returns (in some cases up to 24% yield) and some loans were even secured with a “buyback guarantee”. They had a relatively young and ambitious team. You could request a call back option from their customer service and they had an excellent Trustpilot review score of >4.9. Sounds great. What could possibly go wrong?

Happy TFG friends.

Shut up and reinvest (Late 2019 — early 2020). Some of their loans start to default. TFG Crowd quickly provided a solution to the investors: reinvest the delayed principal payment into the other loans. At the same time, several bloggers begin to investigate TFG Crowd. They have raised grave concerns about their buyback guarantee and dubious loans. Moreover, they have discovered that Emil Kerimovs (CEO of TFG Crowd) wasn’t playing an entirely “clean” game. Apparently, he has created his own borrowing company and has issued 3 loans for himself via TFG Crowd. Still, TFG Crowd’s platform worked flawlessly and their Trustpilot review score remained high.

TFG Crowd to the moon! Big dream slowly turning into a financial disaster.

Worldwide lockdown (March 2020 — September 2020). Ironically, COVID-19 was the best that could possibly happen to TFG Crowd. Their loans were defaulting one by one by March 2020. But now they have finally found a legit excuse for any delayed payment — worldwide lockdown. Indeed, the beginning of the lockdown had a dramatic impact on the worldwide economy, including the struggling P2P lending sector. It was clear to everyone, money recovery will not be fast and easy. However, things were slowly getting ugly. Their customer service was slow in reply and the platform has introduced scammy-looking investment plans. Moreover, TFG Crowd’s reviews on Trustpilot were overloaded with investor complaints. People started to criticize the increased amount of pending payments and shared their experiences dealing with really bad customer support. The number of complaints was so high that their review score dropped from 4.9 to 4.1 within 1 month.

Can TFG Crowd beat the market? The returns from their investment plans looked much better than the average annual return for S&P 500.

The retreat of a commando (December 2020). Mr. Kerimovs wasn’t the only interesting character involved with TFG Crowd. Mr. Alon Gook was appointed as TFG Crowd’s director and has worked for TFG Crowd from October 2019 till December 2020. At the same time, Mr. Gook has worked as a business development manager at Credisafe. He has provided credit reports of borrowing companies to TFG Crowd. All of those reports stated that the borrowers were healthy and sustainable businesses with high credit scores. Take for instance MM World Credisafe report:

Mr. Gook provided an “independent” credit report to investors that ensured the “sustainability” of the borrower's business.

It turns out, MM World wasn’t a sustainable business after all. They have stopped paying their obligations to the investors from January this year, they have removed their phone number and the only option to contact them is via email (same loop as for TFG Crowd). All of this happened a month after Mr. Gook has left TFG Crowd. Interestingly enough, Mr. Gook has removed all information about his involvement with TFG Crowd or Credisafe from his LinkedIn profile (it was available in 2020). He also prefers to be called “Mr. G” now. Another intriguing fact about Mr. G is that he was a former elite commando of the Israeli army. It remains unclear how a former commando specializing in capturing and torturing “terrorists” ended up working for TFG Crowd.

Mr. G has also published a book about his war years. You can read and buy it here.

Winter is coming (October 2020 —May 2021). TFG Crowd’s customer support became almost non-existent. You couldn’t get any personalized support. Replies from their customer support were always generic and it seemed as they used the same phrase to answer any questions. Weirdly enough, their contact phone number has disappeared in January 2021. So you could only send an email/internal message and be lost in a loop of the same generic answers. The information about their executive team has “disappeared” a few weeks later (as of February 2021).

Your face when you realize that TFG Crowd is a scam.

The Bot Wars (March 2021 — Jul 2021). Something interesting has happened within this period. The number of positive reviews praising TFG Crowd has soared on Trustpilot. The reviews were flooded with short, few words, 5-star appraisals such as “Amazing place to invest”, “Satisfaction guaranteed” or “It is really good”. There were no further explanations of why exactly people were so excited about TFG Crowd (maybe they were offered a free ice cream?).

Starting from March 2021, there are at least 30 short and generic reviews that can be used for any type of business.

You could also spot a lot of silly, bot-type reviews. Here are only some of these “pearls”:

Sounds like a description of the “Self-help program”.

Apparently, TFG Crowd stepped into the language learning business.

(W)Very positive review indeed.

Have you spotted something interesting about these reviews? They are not only generic and goofy-sounding. They were the only reviews of the people who wrote them. Surely, there is nothing wrong with it. But at the same time, all of it looks suspicious. It almost seems as if TFG Crowd hired a third-party company to boost their rating on Trustpilot using fake reviews. Otherwise, how could you explain the generic language and unrelated to P2P business appraisals?

And what about investor’s complaints? How did TFG Crowd react to negative reviews? As always, their replies were generic and didn’t address the issues.

Closing the loop.

Don’t worry, be happy!

I have warned Trustpilot about the fake-looking reviews. However, up until now they still have done nothing to investigate or remove any of them.

Invest with TFG Crowd if you want to live.

Real Crowd strikes back (Aug 2021 — present). People involved with TFG Crowd Scam had enough of their suspicious practices and terrible customer support. They started to take real actions against the platform and decided to investigate some borrowers by themself. For instance, I have asked one investor who lives in Kent to pay a visit to Bean2Go and MM World. It turned out, that Bean2Go rents a small desk space in an office building. However, nobody sits at that desk. And nobody picks up the phone for conversation neither. Similar case for MM World. Physical space exists, but there is nobody. Very suspicious and totally looks like a scam. There are multiple groups on Telegram now where people discuss similar cases about TFG Crowd and their borrowers (Tfgcrowd.com discussion or TFG P2P Investor Chat). More and more people are willing to fight TFG Crowd in court. We are currently working with the authorities in the Baltic states to close the platform. We are currently working with the Magnusson Law Firm on a petition against the fake Latvian borrowers. If you are involved with any of the Latvian borrowers via TFG Crowd and would like to support this petition, please contact me or our lawyer, Denis Piskunovs, for more details. Finally, you can always contact the authorities directly to report the scam (Latvian State Police or Estonian State Police). This will support our actions and help our case.

Unfortunately, it remains uncertain how long TFG Crowd Scam will operate and how many more victims this Ponzi Scheme will attract. One is certain, however. The story doesn’t finish here.