On High Yield Investment Programs (HYIP)

Have you heard of high yield investment programs (HYIP)? If you Google it, you will find tons of HYIPs seeking your money to invest in them. DO NOT invest in any one of them. This is based on my personal experience and I feel that I ought to warn anyone out there who are considering to invest in them. I have lost money in ALL of the HYIPs that I invested in (although not much cos I'm just trying out them for fun and what I use are just 'play' money i.e. money that I intend to lose)

As the name suggest, HYIPs offer very high returns to attract people to invest in them. Many of them offer such outrageous returns that stocks, bonds etc pale in comparison to them. They often advertise themselves as some offshore investments but in actual fact they are just scams and ponzi schemes. They can offer such high returns because they pay the older investors from money taken from newer investors and the cycle goes on until the whole scheme collapses due to fewer investors joining the programs later on. They are just like the Madoff scam earlier on.

One of the more recent examples is Genius Funds. It has been around for 1 year plus but shortly after I joined (I decided to try out after reading all the raving reviews online), the whole scam collapsed. Luckily I just tried it out with $50. Genius Funds offer 6% returns per week i.e. 312% per year (uncompounded)!!! The greatest investor in the world Mr Warren Buffet 'only' managed to get approximately 24% per year return throughout his 40 plus years of investing. So simple logic will tell us that something is wrong with Genius Funds. If this guy managing Genius Funds is so much greater than Warren Buffet, why didn't we hear of him/her in the list of the world's richest person??

Always be careful with your investments and if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is!