Mr. Ponzi, thank you!

In the 1920s, Mr. Charles Ponzi created a “financial company”, stating: “Lend me your money, and you will receive 50% in interest.” Thousands and thousands of unwitting people gave him their money amounting to a total of $65 billion. Nobody suspected that he would use newly invested funds to cover previous earlier depositors. This continued until there were no longer enough new depositors to cover the old ones. In the end, this “fairy universe” exploded, leaving many people broke and up against a wall.

100 years later, Karatbars founders have repeated the same story, but in a modern way. For example, their flagship offer, the “VIP package”, costs a total of €3,017. For that money, deceived depositors get a lot of useless “fancy stuff”: 0.1 gram of so-called CashGold and 4 800 KCB coins (with a current price of around 150 bucks). Be aware, none of the aforementioned is underwritten by gold in reality, though Karatbars claims it is, thanks to their imaginary gold mines in Guinea and Madagascar. Should we say that no one in the world accepts CashGold “bills”?

Let’s say it is true. One gram of gold is worth around €40, which means €4 is worth 0.1 grams of gold. So, you trade over €3,000 for actually around €4 (a bottle of beer or cup of coffee) — doesn’t sound very good, right? Furthermore, the VIP package pays a commission up to 60% which means that 99.9% of commissions are being paid on new cash inflows rather than the actual product value (0.1g of gold, about 0.13% of par value), suiting up as the second classic feature of an illegal pyramid scheme.

Company statements are wrong

We went through the “KBC White Paper”, which states: 

“This concept, which is unique in the world, also includes unrestricted coverage of the cryptocurrency by real gold. In order to be able to guarantee this real-physical coverage at any time, KaratGold initiated the participation in a fully developed, functioning gold mine in Madagascar for this purpose and has now successfully completed it. The amount of gold in Madagascar corresponds to a current value of up to €5 billion.” 

Goofed that one, here we got yet another clash. Karatbars states the mine is valued up to € 5 billion, while the independent audit and valuation documents that were publicly posted, points out on value of € 0.94 billion, that is 20% of the mentioned above capitalization. One more evidence to inculpate Karatbar as a poorly made phoney.

WE WILL…COPY IT!

That’s not all. The Karatbars is not only a large-scale commercial fraud but intellectual property and shameless document copying. 

Valuation of Metals and Mining Companies (Author: Svetlana Baurens, 07.11.2010, available under link http://ehrenworthsyme.com/casadeleon/Docs/ValuationofMining.pdf) — the research paper, which became a victim of total replication in Karatbars’ Whitepaper face.

Notes, assessments, figures, statistics etc. — everything has been taken. A total comparison would take an article three times bigger than this one. 

Probably, some of the evidence facts doesn’t look that suspiciously by themselves, but there are too many of them. Taking it all together, we came to the inference that Karatbars is a scam project, that was intended to deceive people, that’s it. 

Image(s): Shutterstock.com

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