Rise and Fall of TFG Crowd. Rats Have Fled, but the Ship Hasn’t Sunk Yet.
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.
It has been a year since my article “Rise and Fall of TFG Crowd. Brief History of Another P2P Ponzi Scheme” was published on Medium. Back then, I felt foolish for being tricked by a p2p crowdfunding scam called “TFG Crowd” and its (already former) crew members Emils Kerimovs, Natalia Nikitina, Alon Gook, and the others. Over the year, I received multiple messages from hundreds of users of TFG Crowd who were scammed by the platform as well. Ultimately, we decided to unite our forces by creating a “Real Crowd” group (no pun intended) with the aim to put Kerimovs & Co before the court. In this post, I would like to follow up on the fate of the wicked platform and how the Real Crowd is doing everything to unveil the TFG Crowd’s fraud.
TFG Crowd as of September 2022. By the time of this post, TFG Crowd had become a ghost platform. All the members of its original team have resigned (more about it in my next post). TFG Crowd’s managing director, Emils Kerimovs, was the last to dump the company, and some unknown Hungarian national, Albert Molnar, is now managing the Latvian business while residing in Germany. Moreover, according to the annual report of TFG Crowd for 2021, no one is working at TFG Crowd anymore, and the platform operates with only 5K Eur left in the bank account.
Not surprisingly, no one is answering the emails, and all the payments have been stopped for almost two years.
Only two ghost projects are left on the platform, both offering you to buy shares of some random companies and lose your money. No information is available about the name of these companies, who stands behind them, or even what they do. Typical for TFG Crowd, pictures of the projects are generic and being taken from stock photography web hosts. Funny enough, they even included generic videos for the “Chemicals factory” project to fake it more “professionally.” LOL.
Rise of the Real Crowd. Since the Real Crowd group was founded, we have opened multiple court cases against TFG Crowd and the borrowers that were advertised on the platform. For example, from the Latvian cases, we have learned that the majority of the borrowers are shell companies with no real business activity, and from the UK cases, that borrowers were real fraudsters that are now being investigated by the UK authorities. The most striking result, however, we discovered in the Estonian case where we demanded TFG Crowd repay us money from their Buyback Guarantee Fund. It turned out that TFG Crowd used two shell companies to withdraw all the money from this fund. To do so, they first created a project from a shell company Digital Auto RZ, called “Automotive Equipment,” which was never publicly available to the users of the platform. Next, this project was immediately funded by a single investor, Crossroads Solution (“funding” occurred within a few hours as the project was created, according to court documents). Then, Digital Auto RZ went bankrupt, according to TFG Crowd, so they “were obliged” to return money to Crossroads Solution. Thus no more money left in the Buyback Guarantee Fund to pay back the liabilities.
Interestingly enough, we have found direct evidence that there was no “insolvency procedure” for Digital Auto RZ. The company was simply deregistered from the Latvian Commercial Register overnight. Just like that, puff and gone! As Digital Auto RZ wasn’t formally declared bankrupt, the Automotive Equipment loan shouldn’t have been compensated by BuyBack Guarantee Fund (according to TFG Crowd’s Terms and Conditions). Moreover, Digital Auto RZ is already involved in the Envestio case as one of the fraud borrowers. We have also discovered that Crossroads Solution is another scam to launder money. It is owned by some shady Russians with no real business in the Czech Republic (according to public records). Unfortunately, the above-described cases are still running, but I hope to update this post with the exact information once we close some of them. Also, we don’t want to show our cards to thieves at this moment.
Criminal actions. 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.
