Recyclix was a scam company who claimed returning sizeable profits from recycling plastic waste. The company was luring people to invest money through "crowd funding", which was actually just a pyramid scheme to rapidly grow the number of investors.
As many of the scams nowadays, Recyclix was a combination of a ponzi and a pyramid scam. The ponzi part of the scam was the mere fact that the company wasn't even doing any plastic recycling. According to Polish media Recyclix didn't even own any recycling plants.
Albeit the company had no recycling business going on, it managed to fool a large number of victims all over the world to invest to the ponzi via a pyramid scheme.
To fool its investors Recyclix went as far as participating recycling related fairs having its booth quite regularly appearing among real recycling companies. In fact this was a genius way to increase the credibility of this scam in a low cost way.
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| The scam participating a fair. |
Occasionally Recyclix also organised tours to some Polish recycling plants, which of course were presented like they were owned by the company. Videos of those tours were used to convince people about the legitimacy of the scheme. You can still find some on YouTube.
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| Recyclix organised tours to some scrappy looking Polish recycling plants to show the members that the piles of garbage were real. Here's a link to the actual video. |
Replastics?
Recyclix scam collapsed in the early 2017. I'm not going in to details here – you can find plenty of them from this blog though.
While snooping the crumbled remains of the pyramid, I noticed that the original website of the scam (recyclix.com) has been just recently altered to present a new company with "Replastics" logo on the top left corner. In addition to the URL word Recyclix can still be found on the website as "Recyclix sp. z o.o." is mentioned. This was the original scam company registered in Poland. Nevertheless, there might be no actual connection to the old company anymore as the scam team apparently dissolved.
There seem to be no operational scam going on... yet. However, considering that the very website was used to run the ponzi pyramid scam, I wouldn't trust anything presented there. It might be part of preparation for a relaunch of Recyclix as Replastics. Of course it's also possible to squeeze some more money from the old victims.
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| Screenshot taken 11 January 2018 from recyclix.com website. |
who is the Video?
ReplyDeleteOh, the video of a tour has been removed. Well, you can still find others from YouTube:
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=recyclix+tour
Seems that recyclix.com is unreachable now. The purpose of "Replastics" remains a mystery, but I guess it there really wasn't any actual purpose for it but maybe just to confuse victims of Recyclix.
ReplyDeleteHowever, due the obvious success of Recyclix I wouldn't be surprised if a similar scam would emerge in the future.
As far as I know not a single scammer behind Recyclix was ever arrested or sued. It's also obvious that most of the victims lost their money.
I didn't lose any money (except $20 Euro because I "kept the door open", shortly after I pulled everything out once they decided to "hold my money"; red flag much?). In fact, I walked away with a decent profit (barely). But it's a rare thing. I was fooled, but they presented everything pretty convincingly. I was sure they must be legit. Sad it wasn't.
ReplyDeleteUsually successful scams do pay out to some. However, it's always the majority of investors who'll end up losing their money.
DeleteThe most important rule of investing:
Never trust anyone offering to make you rich.