Recycling money through the ponzi scam finally backfires
Monday 27th February the company announced a decline in its production because of a fire affecting a recycling plant in Poland. The fire happened conveniently after Recyclix ran into serious banking problems. - I guess there's no better time to say that there's no smoke without fire. To add fuel to the flames the recycling plant in Brożku doesn't even seem to belong to Recyclix but to Eco Recycling sp. Zoo. I couldn't even find any relations between Recyclix and Eco Recycling sp. Zoo.
As posted earlier Recyclix has recently been badly cash strapped due money laundering suspicions. The company's Facebook page is filled with questions about delayed withdrawals. The scammers obviously needed an excuse to further delay withdrawals and this fire was like a gift from heaven... oops, almost typed "matchbox" instead heaven there.
Oddly the company's newsletter refers to a fire that happened "last week, February 14th". That was not last week but nearly two weeks ago. I guess it took some time to make sure that the news about the fire would not mention the real owner of the plant before going public with this.
According to Polish media the fire was huge and lasted days with 25 thousand tons of plastic waste burning. The local prosecutor has opened an investigation about the case.
Update! Featuring "Recycling plant in Brożku does not belong to Recyclix":
Polish media reports: Recyclix is a pyramid scam
New rules
According to the latest Recyclix newsletter:
"The massive fire that has arisen in Brożku landfills not only affected the facility and the equipment line, but furthermost destroyed a significant amount of waste intended for recycling. Fortunately, the facility and the warehouse were insured and the insurance company is now further evaluating the fire case in order to comply with all the procedures.
Recyclix representatives have visited the facility and already estimated the primary loss, stating that the waste capacity has significantly decreased at the moment. Due to the sufficient loss of waste and damage to the equipment, Recyclix is forced to use all its resources to recover from the fire without stopping the further manufacture. The current situation led to certain difficulties in maintaining the balance between the waste volume being in recycling and the real waste capacity."
It's funny that before the fire Recyclix had no problems with its members buying what ever amounts of waste they desired. I bet there has never been shortage of plastic waste before. Imaginary waste sure is easy to deploy.
Turns out "Force Majeure" wasn't "horse manure"
Participating a ponzi pyramid scam is always a risk worth not taking, and it's only natural that a majority of members lose their money. Before an evident collapse there's usually a period that includes pending payments and scammers trying to play time as long as possible scooping any money that still flows into their pockets.
Hence it isn't exactly surprising that Recyclix scammers still try to keep the ponzi going by setting some new rules significantly cutting down the amount going to withdrawals. It's time to pull the Terms of Service card out from sleeve and hit the table with "Force Majeure". A newsletter by the company states:
"In order to continue and be able to proceed with the recycling, revenue payments and further manufacture, Recyclix was forced to adhere to the recovery plan, that way restoring the previous capacity and getting back on the track. It is expected to regain the former balance by June, 2017.
Albeit the risks that come along with the manufacturing business and affect all the involved members, Recyclix would like to point out that the actions taken should be perceived as non-other but a Force Majeure inevitable recovery plan to execute the further operation as smooth as possible. Therefore, all Recyclix website users, who deposited before the fire on February 14th, 2017, will be divided into following categories:
1) Users who are in profit and with less than 33.3% revenue share
2) Users with 33,3% revenue share and in profit
3) Users with less than 33.3% revenue share or not yet in profit
Each group will be assigned a certain % of the waste quota decrease to balance the current waste capacity and operate smoothly during the recovery period, expected till June, 2017."
Recyclix victims angry
Recyclix's Facebook page is swarming with victims of the ponzi pyramid questioning the company's policy and long delayed withdrawals. Some of them seem to be very angry after losing huge amounts of money.
Here are some examples of the victims complaining:
According to Recyclix it has over one million registered users:
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| The blue graph is for Recyclix and the orange one for OneCoin/OneLife. |
Here's the whole newsletter from Recyclix:
RECYCLIX® ON TEMPORARY DECLINE IN PRODUCTION CAPACITY
www.kontakt24.tvn24.pl
One of the major fires for the past few years in Poland broke out in Brożku landfills last week, February 14th, affecting the Zielona Gora Recyclix facility in Poland along with the storehouse and the waste that was kept there. 17 fire units were working on the site while the fire covered 1.5 hectares of land without leaving anything aside.
Recyclix is a manufacturing business that is strongly dependent on the capacity of the raw material, namely the waste for further recycling and pellets production. The massive fire that has arisen in Brożku landfills not only affected the facility and the equipment line, but furthermost destroyed a significant amount of waste intended for recycling. Fortunately, the facility and the warehouse were insured and the insurance company is now further evaluating the fire case in order to comply with all the procedures.
www.polsatnews.pl
Recyclix representatives have visited the facility and already estimated the primary loss, stating that the waste capacity has significantly decreased at the moment. Due to the sufficient loss of waste and damage to the equipment, Recyclix is forced to use all its resources to recover from the fire without stopping the further manufacture. The current situation led to certain difficulties in maintaining the balance between the waste volume being in recycling and the real waste capacity.
In order to continue and be able to proceed with the recycling, revenue payments and further manufacture, Recyclix was forced to adhere to the recovery plan, that way restoring the previous capacity and getting back on the track. It is expected to regain the former balance by June, 2017.
Albeit the risks that come along with the manufacturing business and affect all the involved members, Recyclix would like to point out that the actions taken should be perceived as non-other but a Force Majeure inevitable recovery plan to execute the further operation as smooth as possible. Therefore, all Recyclix website users, who deposited before the fire on February 14th, 2017, will be divided into following categories:
1) Users who are in profit and with less than 33.3% revenue share
2) Users with 33,3% revenue share and in profit
3) Users with less than 33.3% revenue share or not yet in profit
Each group will be assigned a certain % of the waste quota decrease to balance the current waste capacity and operate smoothly during the recovery period, expected till June, 2017.
www.gazetalubuska.pl
Since Recyclix has proved itself as a strong, reliable and fair partner in the past few years, we dare to hope that users stay loyal and share the risks of the recycling business, accepting the offered recovery option.
www.gazetalubuska.pl
Recyclix has experienced a big amount of payout requests over the last month and has implemented certain restrictions in order to process the queue as fast as possible, but there are still payments pending. We would like to apologize for any inconvenience or frustration this caused you and reaffirm that Recyclix payment department has worked hard to resolve the issue and is almost back to the usual operating mode, despite the above mentioned situation.
However, please note that as required by the banking institutions compliance procedures, in order to process wire payments, Recyclix is obliged to confirm every user’s ID and Recyclix-registered address. To receive the wire payment, the ID and address verification documents (ID, utility bill, bank statement, postal ID etc.) have to be uploaded into the system. This is a one-time procedure intended only for internal use of Recyclix. All document verifications are processed manually and might take up to 3-5 business days.
www.gazetalubuska.pl
Considering the situation, Recyclix is likely to revise and extend the deadline for the new registrations and waste-buying option through its current Online-Recycling-Platform that was previously set to October 2017. Recyclix expects that to be revised and announced by June, 2017, after the recovery period termination.
We would appreciate if, considering the circumstances, you would stay patient and loyal. We apologize again for the delay and thank you for your time. We have been happy with our business relationship and trust this incident will not jeopardize our future dealings.
More details on the fire in Brożku landfills can be found in the local polish mass media.
Good article, it is important to mention that although Recyclix were awfully quick to invoke 'force-majeure' and refer people to their 'Risk Sharing' clause of the website 'Terms', they failed to mention that this clause was only added well after the fire.
ReplyDeleteAs explained here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1128611.msg18008336#msg18008336
This means they are not entitled to deduct from user balances, which is what they have done. Although, given that they are a ponzi scam I don't think they particularly care for the law in the first place.
Their Facebook page is being heavily censored at this time, as they are quick to delete comments which challenge what they have done.
Thanks. I noticed some members complaining about the suspicious modification to the Terms of Service by adding the Risk Sharing part. However, I could not confirm it so I decided not to mention it in my post.
ReplyDeleteI checked Google cache but the page capture was dated 22 February. Yours seems to be taken 21/02/17.
I have been trying to contact some Polish people to solve some details about this scam, but haven't got any responses yet.
Yes the page I posted in the Bitcointalk thread which is dated 21st Feb came from a site-scrape I did on that day. I do them occasionally to check for inconsistencies or suspicious changes, something these kind of criminals are prone to try and slip in while they are pivoting to a new angle of the scam.
DeleteWith the collapse of the ponzi already well underway following the repeated reports of withdrawal issues over the previous weeks, it was only going to be a matter of time before Recyclix were going to implement another withdrawal-throttling move.
Although, given that it took them over a week after the fire to add the force-majeure clause 1.9, something which would have had to have been done before the event if they wanted to claim it as being enforceable, it would suggest they weren't particularly clever about how they went about things.
If they started the fire intentionally it suggests they didn't have much of a plan beyond buying themselves time to cover for the lack of withdrawal requests being processed. Only a week later do they seem to have decided to deceive their 'investors' with this false 'Risk Sharing' clause.
Recyclix is a very big scam and the public should stay away from such deal because you will sertainly lose any money invested in such enterprise.
ReplyDeleteSadly you are right. Recyclix was a surprisingly large scam. According to Alexa.com and Similarweb.com Recyclix's web site traffic has reached similar heights of popularity compared to OneCoin, which has been probably the most spread ponzi scam ever.
DeleteIn fact Recyclix's web site chart seems to even top OneCoin's chart on Alexa.com. The reason behind this is likely due the different way these sites have been attracting traffic.
Recyclix has drawn traffic quite regularly as the members have been eyeballing and managing their investments. OneCoin on the other hand has been directing a lot of its traffic to sub sites such as Xcoinx and DealShaker.
Although Recyclix doesn't seem to have quite the popularity of OneCoin's, it too has spread all over the world. It seems though that the popularity of Recyclix is more concentrated to certain countries.
Recyclix has claimed having about 1 million members. OneCoin claims to have above 3 million members. I would trust neither of those figures to be accurate, because scams tend to exaggerate a lot in addition to lying.