Cash of the Titan – Fulham, MLMs and impossible returns

[ExiledAjax]

Football, money, and dodgy deals. An all too common recipe that more often than not causes pain to many. I write this post to show just how easily a club can fall into what looks to be a potentially very sticky trap. All credit to journalist Martin Calladine, and thanks to @WolfOfWestStreet for putting me onto his work.

A couple of weeks ago, Titan Capital Markets were unveiled as Fulham’s “Official CFD Trading Partner”. CFD's are highly regulated in the UK, you can't just sell them to everyone willy-nilly as they are complicated financial instruments. This new sponsor is an opaque trading firm which “guarantees” 248% annual returns and has a complex, multi-tiered rewards scheme. Fulham's press release from 29 Sep 2022 states "Titan Capital Markets is an integrated educational financial group providing comprehensive online and offline courses and systematic community trading training programmes to improve learners’ financial mindset and Forex Trading skills." Basically, buy our snake oil and you too can become mega-rich.

The below is a summary of the following extensive post in which Calladine presents all of his evidence and argument to show that this glossy partnership is really quite odd https://theuglygame.wordpress.com/2022/10/04/cash-of-the-titan-fulham-mlms-and-impossible-returns/

Firstly, the company was formed on 28 March 2022, but on it's website (launched 3 days later) it posted proud boasts of the incredible returns it had made in January, February, and March of 2022...three months where it didn't exist. If those claimed returns are true (they obviously aren't) then £100 invested in January 2022 with the “Fire Fox” trading team would have been worth £657.80 by the end of June. That is the equivalent of an annual return of 1,216%. That doesn't happen.

Other than its work with Fulham FC, Titan appears to mostly recruit customers and offer it's "comprehensive online and offline courses and systematic community trading training programmes" to consumers in emerging markets. It does this almost exclusively through Telegram posts such as the one below.

Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it's perhaps not the marketing method you'd expect to see from a firm that is partnering with a grand old English football club.

As Calladine says this makes sense when you actually sit through a Titan presentation. Rather than being a trading firm, it appears instead to be a multi-level marketing firm (MLM), which charges for membership and distributes rewards based on numbers recruited and trading performance in a range of tiers. Whether an MLM or a pyramid scheme, it's clearly one of them.

Then (inevitably) we see the introduction of everyone's favourite get-rich quick scheme cryptocurrency. The “how to deposit” tutorial appears to suggest that investors must do so using Tethers, a so-called “stablecoin” – a cryptocurrency designed to maintain parity with the US dollar to facilitate crypto trading. Calladine asked Titan why crypto was part of the scheme and if people could invest in standard fiat currency, but did not hear back from them.

Finally, Calladine goes into some detail demonstrating how most if not all of the people listed on Titan's website and in their materials as being part of the board or senior staff are either completely made up, or are lying about their qualifications, experience, or a combination of the two.

In all I post this as a warning. Fulham are clearly in some trouble here. A failure to do some basic DD (Calladine states that finding this out took him a matter of a few hours on Google) looks to have gotten Fulham into some dodgy waters, and potentially worse. Their fans have picked up on it and aren't happy https://www.friendsoffulham.com/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=fc928f6253751c8fefa081455d2e1061&topic=88022.0

We have to be equally vigilant of our own Club. At the slightest hint of similar partnerships or schemes we need to be onto Gould, Barton, or whoever else signs it off. No club should be seen dead with companies such as this, and I especially do not want City to ever be in this position. We also have to make fans aware, make it known, make Titan infamous, so thanks for reading and watch out for scams.

Edited October 12, 2022 by ExiledAjax

[chinapig]

Thanks for posting this latest example of the lengths football clubs will go to out of greed, including tempting their fans to sign up to scams.

It wasn't so long ago that Man City signed up to (and were forced to withdraw from) a deal with a crypto company when it was pointed out to them that the company had no online presence at all, so this is not a one off.

Even without carrying out due diligence it's obvious nobody should touch this latest scam with a barge pole on the grounds that if it looks too good to be true it is.

Love the game, hate the business. 

[Sir Geoff]

Excuse my ignorance, but what is a CFD ?

[Harry]

25 minutes ago, Sir Geoff said:

Excuse my ignorance, but what is a CFD ?

Crypto Fascist Dictatorship 

[ExiledAjax]

35 minutes ago, Sir Geoff said:

Excuse my ignorance, but what is a CFD ?

It stands for "Contract for Difference". Two parties, typically described as "buyer" and "seller", stipulating that the buyer will pay to the seller the difference between the current value of an asset and its value at contract time. If the closing trade price is higher than the opening price, then the seller will pay the buyer the difference, and that will be the buyer’s profit. The opposite is also true. That is, if the current asset price is lower at the exit price than the value at the contract’s opening, then the seller, rather than the buyer, will benefit from the difference.

[Sitrom]

1 hour ago, ExiledAjax said:

It stands for "Contract for Difference". Two parties, typically described as "buyer" and "seller", stipulating that the buyer will pay to the seller the difference between the current value of an asset and its value at contract time. If the closing trade price is higher than the opening price, then the seller will pay the buyer the difference, and that will be the buyer’s profit. The opposite is also true. That is, if the current asset price is lower at the exit price than the value at the contract’s opening, then the seller, rather than the buyer, will benefit from the difference.

[Major Isewater]

Bunch of charlatans.

[WolfOfWestStreet]

No worries @ExiledAjax Martin does some great work digging up the grim underbelly of football finance. 

This particular deal is particularly horrible because it "looks" like greedy white men pyramid selling to very low income West Africans. Now the cat is out of the bag it's only a matter of time before Fulham cut ties.

Other good journalists in this space worth following are 

 

[WolfOfWestStreet]

[Hxj]

On 12/10/2022 at 12:59, Sir Geoff said:

what is a CFD ?

to cut to the chase it converts a variable price to an agreed fixed price.

[cidered abroad]

On 12/10/2022 at 13:25, Harry said:

Crypto Fascist Dictatorship 

I'm none the wiser as to what it is. But then I'm an old geezer who still thinks in Pounds, shillings and pence in my Post Office savings account!