Kenya has had a fair share of financial scams of monumental proportions that leave premium tears to its victims.
The playbook is always the same, yet people never seem to learn. Currently, there is a craze for so called online stock trading minting thousands of dollars monthly.
I will pick one called QVSE for demonstration purposes. It is sweeping Lower Eastern counties like a spell, mainly targeting rural based professionals like teachers, healthcare workers and county staff.
All Red Flags of a scam are screaming to the heavens, yet hundreds of people are lining up to sign-in like sheep being led for slaughter.
1. QVSE full title is Quant Vest Stock Exchange. It is not a licensed stock exchange in America where it purports to trade. It doesn’t actually seem to have any operations within America, but only luring people in poor countries in Africa and Asia.
2. It has no structure at all, only a guy listed as Robert Hayes. No board of directors or staff exist. If you google, the first thing you see is that it has been flagged in several countries as a scam. Consumer watch bodies & Regulators have categorically called it an unregulated ponzi/pyramid scheme.
3. In Kenya, it is only a mobile contact and WhatsApp groups and you are required to pay about KES.65,000 or KES.130,000 to enroll. To earn, you MUST recruit other people under your name. This is the classical pyramid scheme model. Anybody saying they are earning, it is just a commission paid to them for recruiting others, not because of any stock trading anywhere in the world.
4. Anybody who collects money from the public for investments/trading is highly regulated and must be licensed in the host country. It is more stringent when such a business crosses to operate in other countries. For instance, the Capital Markets Authority (CMA) has already issued a warning to the public about these schemes. Why do you think you are more clever than them?
5. The people marketing these schemes have no background or not known financial experts; mostly it is social media socialists. All they purport to show are clips withdrawing purported dollars online!
6. With all due respect, how can people who have never even seen the doors of Nairobi Securities Exchange, the official Stock market for Kenya, suddenly become too clever to trade stocks in the most advanced and sophisticated financial market in the world -America?
Why would poor people in rural townships and villages of Kenya imagine they can mint dollars in America, that Americans themselves have not been able to identify and mint?
Can someone explain this to me like a 2 year old child?