Coinfinesse Group Review: Coinfinity reboots after launch collapse
Coinfinesse Group began as Coinfinity. In the short time between me adding Coinfinity to the review list and beginning research for this review, Coinfinity collapsed.
Today Coinfinity’s old website domain redirects to Coinfinesse Group.
Coinfinesse Group’s website domain was registered on December 10th, 2019. Coinfinity Group had only launched a few weeks earlier.
Coinfinesse Group identifies Mario Helmut (below) as CEO of the company.
As per Helmut’s executive bio above, he claims to have “worked in the financial industry for more than 40 years”.
Perusal of Helmut’s LinkedIn profile reveals a claimed twenty-five year stint at Zurcher Kantonalbank.
This isn’t verifiable outside of Coinfinesse Group related marketing however. In fact, outside of a few recently crafted social media profiles, Mario Helmut has no digital footprint.
Two Mario Helmut Facebook profiles were only just created on the 11th and 27th of December, 2019.
While someone is definitely playing Mario Helmut, I’m flagging there being no digital footprint as highly suspicious.
The cynic in me feels that Helmut comes off as some old guy whoever is actually running Coinfinesse Group dug out of somewhere.
One last thing, I had a poke around but was unable to find out why Coinfinity was abandoned so soon after launch.
Update 30th December 2019 – Turns out while Coinfinity Group as a company name did collapse around launch, it wasn’t because of financial reasons.
Upon learning of Coinfinity Group, an Austrian bitcoin brokerage firm going by Coinfinity threatened to sue them for trademark infringement.
And so Coinfinity Group became Coinfinesse Group in early December. /end update
Whoever is running Coinfinesse appears to have ties to and/or is based out of Europe.
Coinfinesse’s website was registered through a German registrar.
Read on for a full review of Coinfinesse Group’s MLM opportunity.
Coinfinesse Group’s Products
Coinfinesse Group has no retailable products or services, with affiliates only able to market Coinfinesse Group affiliate membership itself.
Coinfinesse Group’s Compensation Plan
Coinfinesse affiliates invest bitcoin or ethereum on the promise of weekly returns of up to 3.6%.
- invest $100 or more worth of BTC or ETH and receive up to 2.4% a week
- invest $2500 or more worth of BTC or ETH and receive up to 3.6% a week
Coinfinesse Group doesn’t appear to be any investment term limits. At least not officially.
Coinfinesse Group Affiliate Ranks
There are ten affiliate ranks within Coinfinesse Group’s compensation plan.
Along with their respective qualification criteria, they are as follows:
- One Star – generate a downline who have together earned $1000 in weekly returns
- Two Star – generate a downline who have together earned $5000 in weekly returns
- Three Star – generate a downline who have together earned $20,000 in weekly returns
- Four Star – generate a downline who have together earned $50,000 in weekly returns
- Five Star – generate a downline who have together earned $80,000 in weekly returns
- Six Star – generate a downline who have together earned $150,000 in weekly returns
- Seven Star – generate a downline who have together earned $250,000 in weekly returns
- Eight Star – generate a downline who have together earned $500,000 in weekly returns
- Nine Star – generate a downline who have together earned $1,000,000 in weekly returns
- Ten Star – generate a downline who have together earned $3,000,000 in weekly returns
Referral Commissions
Coinfinesse Group pays referral commissions via a unilevel compensation structure.
A unilevel compensation structure places an affiliate at the top of a unilevel team, with every personally recruited affiliate placed directly under them (level 1):
If any level 1 affiliates recruit new affiliates, they are placed on level 2 of the original affiliate’s unilevel team.
If any level 2 affiliates recruit new affiliates, they are placed on level 3 and so on and so forth down a theoretical infinite number of levels.
Coinfinesse Group caps payable unilevel team levels at twelve.
Referral commissions are paid out on weekly returns paid to affiliates across these twelve levels as follows:
- level 1 – 100%
- level 2 – 50%
- level 3 – 10%
- levels 4 to 8 – 5% (paid to 3 Star and higher)
- levels 9 to 12 – 3% (paid to 5 Star and higher)
Rank Achievement Bonus
Coinfinesse Group affiliates are rewarded with the following Rank Achievement Bonuses:
- qualify as a One Star and receive $200
- qualify as a Two Star and receive $1000
- qualify as a Three Star and receive $4000
- qualify as a Four Star and receive $10,000
- qualify as a Five Star and receive $15,000
- qualify as a Six Star and receive $30,000
- qualify as a Seven Star and receive $50,000
- qualify as an Eight Star and receive $100,000
- qualify as a Nine Star and receive $150,000
- qualify as a Ten Star and receive $450,000
Joining Coinfinesse Group
Coinfinesse Group affiliate membership is free.
Participation in the attached income opportunity however requires a minimum $100 investment in bitcoin and/or ethereum.
Conclusion
Coinfinesse Group represents that it generates external revenue via crypto trading and related activities.
Naturally no evidence of any claims are provided. Nor is Coinfinesse Group registered to offer securities in any jurisdiction it solicits investment in.
In addition to committing securities fraud, Coinfinesse Group’s business model fails the Ponzi logic test.
If “Mario Helmut” was legitimately able to generate weekly returns of up to 3.6%, why not just quietly compound until he becomes the richest person on the planet?
And presuming the same ruse was used for Coinfinity Group, why then did it collapse so shortly after launch?
The answer lies in Coinfinesse Group operating as your typical MLM crypto Ponzi scheme.
Gullible investors hand over bitcoin and ethereum to Coinfinesse Group’s owners.
They pocket it and generate monopoly money backoffice returns.
When new investment inevitably runs dry, withdrawal requests will no longer be honored and “Mario Helmut” and friends go into hiding.
You saw how quickly it can happen with Coinfinity Group. The only difference with Coinfinesse Group collapsing is, if enough money is stolen, this time there won’t be a reboot.
Update 16th March 2020 – Earlier today Coinfinesse Group informed investors it was capping withdrawals.
The company has also prohibited affiliates from pulling out of their investment contracts.
I don’t think they collapsed, it’s the same people who had to change their name in a hurry.
There is an unrelated, and as far as I can tell entirely legitimate, bitcoin brokerage from Graz, Austria called Coinfinity, who own the EU trademark on that name.
The genuine Coinfinity weren’t amused when they found about this new Coinfinity Group, and took legal action. From their statement:
Source: coinfinity.co/news-en/
The fact that they launched without first checking whether the name wasn’t already trademarked doesn’t suggest a very serious business.
That would be on any standard pre-incorporation checklist for a new company, or any new product for an existing company.
The original name collapsed because they weren’t counting on a third-party going after them for trademark infringement.
Thanks for digging that up!
As far I know they are just new on the market and screwed something with the name.
Was taken or something else. My friend invited me there, and so far everything looks fine.
Well, as “fine” as a Ponzi scheme waiting to steal your money can look. Sure.
Let see. I think they are credible. Do you have some evidence?
You’ve made the claim Coinfinesse Group is credible. Where’s your evidence?
I can tell you Coinfinesse Group isn’t registered to offer securities. So that’s securities fraud.
There’s also no retail. So we can add pyramid fraud too.
MLM + securities fraud = Ponzi scheme. That enough evidence for you?
@Aron: Let’s spend some time to see just how “credible” they are, shall we?
There is literally no information about the company on its website. No address, no phone number, not even an email address, no country of incorporation, no mention of where it is regulated (given the product it claims to sell, it must be registered with at least one regulatory agency somewhere to operate legally anywhere in the civilized world).
There are two presentation PDFs, which also completely lack such information. (Those are in the same bad English as the website, reflecting what on first impression looks like underlying German – can’t this company afford to hire a translation agency?)
The closest thing to corporate information we find are in a “Terms” and a “Privacy” document, which add the letters “LTD” after the company name, that’s it.
I might add here that not providing this information in sales publications such as this website is already illegal in at least several EU countries.
So let’s see if we can find out if they’re actually incorporated somewhere. As luck would have it, they’re registered in the UK (where else?).
Coinfinesse Group Ltd. was registered on December 12th, 2019, just a day after its CEO first appeared on LinkedIn, with a nominal capital of 15 million pound (note that under English law, not a single pound of this has to actually exist):
beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/12361728
Mario Helmut is not just the company’s CEO, he is its sole owner and director. That alone flatly contradicts the statement on the website: “The Coinfinesse Group is an investment association.”
It is in fact a one-man business, a “Group” with Helmut as its only member.
It also flatly contradicts his statement: “My intention when I joined the Coinfinesse Group as a CFO and later on as CEO was to build a legacy.”
There was nothing for him to join, he set up the company one day after the PDF which contains that claim was created, and as sole owner and director he can of course give himself whatever silly job title he wants to.
But wait, Helmut had first called his business Coinfinity. Let’s look for that. And yes, there it is: a company called Coinfinity Group Investment Corporation Ltd was registered on November 29th:
beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/12340589
It is in every way identical to Coinfinesse Group, except for the name, and therefore also has a 15 million pound capital.
It is still in existence, no request to strike it off has been filed, which is what you do when you want to dissolve a company.
Now explain this: why didn’t somebody who sets up a company which needs to change its name, because he hadn’t bothered to check first whether somebody already owned that name, not simply change the name?
Especially since that company had already hired quite a few people (according to its website) and therefore must have signed employment contracts, would probably also have signed contracts for office leases so those people would have a place to work, would already have bank accounts, etc.?
Instead, he created a second, entirely new 15 million pound company, without doing anything about the first one. Is he so rich that he has another 15 million in spare cash lying around?
Or, perchance, neither the first nor the second 15 million ever existed, and the company had never signed any contracts, employment or otherwise, so it doesn’t actually matter.
All he needs is the £12 for the online registration fee. He didn’t want people looking up the company at Companies House to see that name change immediately after creation, because that might look shady.
So he registered another company, doubling his startup costs to an astronomical £24, and will just let the first one be struck off automatically after a year, when it doesn’t file an annual return.
Of course since he is selling securities from the UK, his company should be registered with the Financial Conduct Authority, which entirely predictably it isn’t.
There is an additional mystery, though. There is another company called Coinfinity Group Ltd, which was registered on October 25th, 2019.
It also has a 15 million pound capital, but has someone called Charlie Cara as its sole owner and director. It also uses a different address. Otherwise, it looks like a clone of the other two.
I haven’t yet had the time to look into that further, I’ll stick with the Helmut-registered companies since his name is all over the material. (There’s also yet another Coinfinity Group Ltd., but that was dissolved in January 2019 and appears to be unrelated.)
The registered office address for both of those companies is: Silverstream House, 45 Fitzroy Street, London, United Kingdom, W1T 6EB. That is also the only correspondence address given for Helmut personally. Let’s, just for fun, look at that.
The grandly named “Silverstream House” is in fact two tiny “shared” office rooms and one preposterously named “meeting room” (a pokey room with one little round table with two chairs; squeezed in next to that is a two-seater couch and a small fridge, which I presume make up what they refer to as the “breakout area”), on the two floors above a small corner shop.
The company operating it offers a “Virtual Office with Post Forwarding” service at £25 a month (£18.75 a month if you pay a year in advance). That includes scanning and emailing all incoming mail (which they claim normally costs £7.5 a month extra, but is “free if you sign up today” – which no doubt is one of those permanent “free today” offers).
For a mere £10 a month extra, you can also have a landline registered to your company name and have someone answer it with that name to take messages.
Or simply have the phone line switched through to your real phone. But since Coinfinesse doesn’t have a phone number, they probably didn’t go to such extravagant expense.
Yes, that sounds exactly like the office accommodation a highly credible “investment association” would use, doesn’t it, especially one which already employs 4 experienced Developers, 2 Marketing Experts, 3 Relationship Managers, 5 senior traders, 2 analysts and 3 technical based coders, plus Helmut of course (employment claims per the presentation.pdf document).
I make that 20 people in total. There are a total of 10 chairs on the two floors of “Silverstream House” (not counting the two-person “meeting room”, and the toilet on the ground floor).
Now let’s take a brief glance at Mario Helmut himself.
He is supposed to have had a long and successful career with a succession of extremely reliable Swiss banks. His last but one job before retirement at the Zürcher Kantonalbank, where he worked for nearly 25 years (one of the most solid banks in the world, wholly owned by the Canton of Zürich) is given as “Head Of Controlling Private Banking” (March 2007 – November 2012).
No such job title in bad English exists, of course, and it’s very odd he would get the name of his own job wrong. What the ZKB does have is a “Head of Private Banking”, so we must presume that that is the position he held.
Now here is the problem: that job has been held, since 2008, by a man called Christoph Weber. He is also the deputy CEO, a vice-president, and president of the ZKB’s Austrian subsidiary. (See: zkb.ch/de/uu/nb/wer-wir-sind/struktur/generaldirektion – people in Swiss banking jobs like that don’t have LinkedIn profiles).
This is such an important position, at a major bank, that Mr Weber has a considerable footprint in the financial media.
The only question left unanswered is whether the mysterious Mario Helmut, who doesn’t seem to have any online existence before November 2019, and now only exists in material produced by Coinfinesse/Coinfinity, is a real person lying about himself and about his company, for obviously fraudulent purposes; or is entirely fictional, just a name with a picture of a random plucked off the internet attached.
(Or, possibly, a hired actor, but you only need that if you plan on trotting out Helmut for public appearances. Plus, in criminal enterprises using hired help is always risky.)
He’s in at least one marketing video so is represented by an actual person. I’m going with actor.
As you also noticed, there’s no record of him outside of Coinfinesse Group, so “Mario Helmut” is likely just a fictional character.
I went for an interview, at their perceived office in Janáčkovo, Tokovoa building.
They sent me an email from a gmail address, the following to be precise. Nicola Domanin .com, professing that I should come for an interview.
I read this blog beforehand and realized it was a scam, however, my partner was insistent that I should find a job and this blog could be a malicious or vindictive ex customer or employee.
They were nowhere to be found, the receptionist was puzzled by this company name and NO coin finesse was on the 7th floor or any floor as they said.
Hoaxers, as I expected, they wasted a couple of hours of my life and 56 czk.
@Mark, who are you that you have got the invitation?
They got keys to the office the 17th Jan 2020. The office is going to be open officially February 1st. Nicola seems to be an office manager.
I’m sure they wouldn’t be able to put all stuff inside during the weekend.
Anyway there are Coinfinesse logos on the 7th floor. As I know everything will be ready for 100% for the opening.
Let’s see.
@mark it seems there are some logos already.
Check out these pictures facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=3428780370529068&set=a.877032945703836&type=3&sfns=mo
It is a big scam. The public prosecution of Zurich is already investigating against the owners Özcan Köme and David Bras.
Also involved in this scam are serial scammers like Rafal Pietruk, Remon Cortez, Hein Vermannen and Kamil Niedźwiecki.
They scammed people in Omega.best, EXP Asset, FutureNet, Cryp Trade Capital and many more.
@Patryk any proofs of that the business is investing in Zurich??
These people who you mentioned are just network marketers, everyone who joins here know the risk.
Or did they do something bad? Like rea scammers do?
Uh, people who promote scams are scammers.
Also you cannot assert everyone who joins scams “knows the risk”. Plenty of scammers promote scams by insisting they aren’t scams.