As more and more people are becoming interested in investing in cryptocurrencies, there has been an increase in the number of scams that have been set up with the sole purpose of stealing funds from digital currency investors. Apexcoins seems to be the latest cryptocurrency scam to hit the African market.

What is Apexcoins?

“Apexcoins offers investors an opportunity to obtain exposure to cryptocurrencies whilst benefiting from the stability of asset-backed security,” according to their description on their LinkedIn page.

They go on to state that they “allow investors the opportunity to move against volatility in the cryptocurrency markets, without incurring the frictional costs of converting their holdings into fiat”.

In simple terms, Apexcoins claims to give its investors an opportunity to see their cryptocurrency grow by investing it for them.

Apexcoins was allegedly established in 2016 and is a subsidiary of Apex Limited, a United Kingdom registered company. Moreover, the company claims to have operations in 20+ countries, including Kenya, where it says it serves 2,000+ customers and has more than ten representatives.

How Does Apexcoins Claim to Work?

Priding itself as a company that is a link between financial traders, experts and investors globally, Apexcoins boasts that its investments are backed by real-life assets. In order to invest in Apexcoins, you first need to buy bitcoin, which is the primary and only digital currency that the company uses. If you do not own bitcoin, you will have to purchase BTC from online exchanges.

With bitcoin at hand, the next step is to engage with an “Apexcoins specialist” to invest the cryptocurrency for you. What the Apexcoins specialist allegedly will do is reinvest your money, now in cryptocurrency and not fiat currency, for you in real assets like real estate property and securities in a bid to have your money earn profits for you.

Simply put, for you to have Apexcoins invest and earn profits on your behalf, you first have to buy bitcoin and deposit them in their Apexcoins account where – through a claimed partnership with financial traders and experts, the company says it will generate a guaranteed profit for you.

These “guaranteed” profits are allegedly paid out weekly in bitcoin at a given rate depending on one of the three investment schemes that an investor chooses. Apexcoins has three investment schemes with interest rates – each much higher than interest rates on any established investments. An investor can opt for either one of the three schemes as described below:

Basic investment plan where investors invest anything between $100-1,000 with a guarantee of 8.25 percent weekly interest for a period of three months.

weekly interest for a period of three months. Premium holder plan where investors invest anything between $1,000-100,000 with a guarantee of a 30 percent monthly interest for a period of either one, three or six months.

monthly interest for a period of either one, three or six months. VIP investment plan where investors invest anything more than $100,000 with a 33 percent interest guarantee per month for a six month period.

Investors have the option to reinvest their returns back into the business or take the whole amount after the end period for the particular investment scheme they have chosen.

However, no mention was made on the company website (before it went offline) of how Apexcoins goes about investing your funds and how they are able to generate a much higher return on investment, on a monthly basis, than any other legitimate investment management company ever has in the history of the financial markets.

Is Apexcoins a Scam?

Unfortunately, Africa has become a popular market for Ponzi schemes and other fraudulent get-rich-quick schemes. A lack of jobs, financial resources, and investment education make people very susceptible to these type of schemes.

Apexcoins is keen on solidifying its interest in not just the Kenyan market but also in South Africa and Ghana. However, for a company that prides itself in professionalism and transparency, there seems to be a lot to question about Apexcoins.

For one, their LinkedIn page seems to have information that cannot be verified as it shows that they are located in three countries: Great Britain, South Africa, and Kenya. However, despite being in these three locations and stating that they have more than 10,000 plus employees, a simple search on LinkedIn only shows results for three employees, two in Kenya and one in Ghana. In addition, they seem to have no employees in London, which is where they are supposedly headquartered.

For a company with alleged operations in three countries and which boasts of 10 plus representatives in Kenya alone, this information cannot be verified with a simple search on one of the world’s leading recruitment platform. Apexcoins launched in Kenya in 2018 and even held a seminar titled ‘Investing for Profits With Apexcoins in Kenya’ to lure in “investors.” It also held seminars in other African countries. Since the completion of the seminars, however, all of its websites have since gone offline.

Our research further revealed that since they started operations in Kenya, they had not paid their Kenyan representatives and had spent time in-house trying to deliberate on the remuneration and contract issue of their representatives. This was according to an email sent by a Steve Mason, who refers to himself as a Senior Investment Specialist for Apexcoins in the email, which was posted on Facebook.

Seeing that Apexcoins claims to make profits when their investors make profits, this begs the question, for a company that allegedly has operations in more than 20 countries and oversees the portfolio of small to big clientele and has a business model that is solid and generates profits for its investors, how does it fail to make money to pay its own employees?

In addition, they state that the bitcoin price fluctuations do not affect investors in any way. How do they guarantee this? As we know, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have had a rough year, so how is that possible? No investment management operation in the world can deliver the returns that Apexcoins guarantees.

Furthermore, the Financial Services Commission of Mauritius issued a public notice on July 27, 2018, that warned its citizens to be cautious when it comes to dealing with Apexcoins as it considers Apexcoins’ operations as highly questionable.

Furthermore, in Apexcoins whitepaper, where the company’s supposed team members are listed, is lacking images of each team member, which is very odd for a whitepaper in the cryptocurrency space, but what stands out even more as another red flag is that none of the mentioned team members seem to have a digital footprint. This suggests that the names used in the whitepaper are most likely fake.

Apexcoins’ List of Red Flags

Makes claims of impossibly high guaranteed monthly returns.

Claims that investors cannot lose their investment.

The company has not paid its representatives.

Its website has disappeared.

The Mauritian Financial Services Authority has warned its citizens against Apexcoins.

The whitepaper mentions supposed team members without images who have no digital footprint.

Do Not Invest in Apexcoins!

Bitcoin Africa’s research into Apexcoins has concluded that our findings point towards Apexcoins being a scam. Apexcoins appears to be piggybacking off the hype surrounding cryptocurrencies to gather funds from unwitting newcomers to the digital currency space who are not able to recognise the sea of red flags.

We, therefore, recommend to avoid investing in Apexcoins as the likelihood of you receiving your invested funds back, let alone an actual return on investment, is extremely low.

Fortunately, given that their website is no longer accessible and their social media activity has fizzled out since early autumn, it seems that Apexcoins did not manage to find a footing in Africa. Perhaps the collapse of MMM has made people more sceptical about cryptocurrency investment program or the scheme made bank on its seminar attendees who invested in the scheme and decided to call it quits.