Is Grupeer a Scam?

Disclaimer: This post serves as my personal opinion. It doesn’t mean that any of the written below is 100% proven.

Grupeer has been until recently, one of the most respected and well viewed P2P platforms by the community. It’s even the one where I invested most of my money (€2,5k) and actually made an interview with their CEO.

Unfortunately, it turns out that even the ones who look more honest may actually be another fraud just like Envestio and Kuetzal.

So, let’s start with what is concerning me:

Fake Loan Originators

Epic Cash, Lion Lender, and Monetria turned out to be all fake. Some people have called the Central Bank of Russia and these companies do not have a license to operate in the lending business, which is illegal.

Furthermore, I’ve made research and all of these companies seem to have been built with the same technologies and any of those pages seem to have any traffic at all, i.e., visitors.

On the top right corner, you can clearly see that they didn’t even bother using different technologies when building these similar websites. You can use the Wappalyzer extension and see it by yourself.

Most Loans are Issued by Their Fake Loan Originators

Below I show just a small percentage of my loans and sadly it is easy to see that most of them go to the fake loan originators as well as to the Finsputnika Platforma (which is owned by the Grupeer’s CEO, Alla Kisika).

Where is The Money Actually Going?

From the beginning that I struggled in understanding where the money I was investing actually went. The way the company bundles the loans and mixes good apples with bad apples was always strange and something really different from what other companies in the same market do.

All of their loans were something similar to the one above. Basically they collected big sums of money to many individuals rather than to just one (like Mintos for example does.) This lack of transparency made me not invest more money in them. To be honest, looking at all of the present facts, I don’t know how I fell for them. I guess I’m learning with my own mistakes and that in the end, it is my fault to have been so naive…

Withdrawals Are Delayed and Most of The Team Was Fired

Some people requested for an withdrawal more than 10 days ago (18/03/2020) and have received the excuse that the payments were delayed due to Covid-19 issues. In Grupeer you cannot sell your loans which means that the money you receive in your account is from your investment payments!

When they argue they don’t have money to pay it simply can’t be true. Or they are really bad managers or the money already went somewhere else – probably Russia like their fake Loan Originators.

The video below shows the weak statement of their CEO where she is clearly reading a script.

It also seems that most of the team has been fired, as someone from Grupeer itself stated in the Grupeer Discussion in Telegram which you can join here.

In this group we’re also starting to prepare the law action against Grupeer, so make sure you join it and follow the pinned steps if you’re also one of the affected investors.

Collecting Money For Loan Originators They Do Not Have Any Agreement With

Apparently Grupeer was also receiving payments from Loan Originators who they claimed to be cooperating with. When contacting some of these companies, the response was the one we can see below…

Like pretending to have bonds with some loan originators was not enough, they also pretended to have connections with companies related to development projects. As we can see by the email’s response below, this company didn’t sign any agreement with Grupeer and even if it did, the value they were asking was 1.8 million lower than the one Grupeer put available to the investors…

So What Can You Do?

You can join the Armada. Organised by a group of investors, it contains all the necessary steps to participate in a law action against Grupeer. After joining, you’ll be added to the Official Telegram Group of this process.

A well-known blogger – Ido – created this website in which you can read the latest updates of the Grupeer case and learn how to participate.

It also contains the necessary steps in case you want to participate in the Grupeer Law Case.

Thank you for this, Ido. It is good to know we can still count with some good and honest people in this world.

Conclusion

To lose your money because of a bad investment is one thing, to lose it to a scam is another. And the latter hurts much more because it is something you were not prepared to. Bloggers interview, online videos, some real projects and loan originators, and then… all seems to be rehearsed.

I’m suspending all my Crowdlending investments in the long term until this Covid-19 crisis settles down AND more importantly until P2P Lending becomes regulated and licensed by the European Union. Unfortunately, without regulation, it is hard for investors to know the veracity of these businesses, even though some of them might be legitimate. The recent scams like Envestio and Kuetzal were hard to diggest, and now Grupeer, one of the most popular ones is also in the list of suspects. For me, it is enough until something in the P2P industry changes for the better.

Last but not least, I want to thank the work of Bernard Hummel, who has made a magnificent job in favor of the P2P community with all the interview and proactive efforts he had in trying to find out the real players of Crowdlending.