Friday 4 November 2011

The Voice - Consumer's Voice

Dear Consumer’s Voice

I was invited to a presentation by a South African company called Cashflow Pro. They said I could earn lots of money trading foreign exchange. Can this be correct?


If you believe what they say then it’s a certainty. However I’m skeptical. I contacted the presenters and was told that they “teach people how to trade forex online and make between 10 and 30 percent of their investment every month”. They said “we open a trading account for you and you can put any amount you want to start trading with but we recommend US$1,000”.

My first objection is that nobody makes that sort of money trading foreign exchange. In fact nobody makes that sort of return doing anything. Ask yourself this. If this sort of return was possible don’t you think the banks would be doing it? Don’t you think they could got out of their banking crisis with a bit of online trading? No, they couldn’t, they didn’t and neither can you or I. That level of return simply isn’t possible.

They way they earn money of course is by charging their recruits a fee. The presenter told me that “the price is P12,000 but for the first 50 people its P7,000 then back to the normal price”.

There’s more. One of the founders of Cashflow Pro is a guy called Jabulani Ngcobo. According to the South African press Ngcobo is currently under investigation by the South African Reserve Bank and the South African Police Commercial Crimes Unit. It seems that for someone with no qualifications and no business history the amount of money he’s bringing in is too much to be credible. There are suspicions that he’s running either a pyramid or Ponzi scheme.

Above all this reminds me of Stock Market Direct who you may recall came to Botswana in a mixture of extravagant promises and deceptions about who and what they were. Their founder, Tony Samuels, eventually skipped the country with a suitcase full of investors cash and hasn’t been since. I’d steer clear if I were you.

Cellphone abuse

We were contacted by a reader who purchased a cellphone for P699 from Edgars in Gaborone. Eight days later it stopped working properly. The problems began when she took the phone back to the store. Her receipt said quite clearly “Do not return this product to the store. If failure occurs after seven (7) days, please call the relevant toll free number below for customer assistance”.

In fact there were four different numbers, all in South Africa and all of them unreachable from Botswana. Three of them referred to Cell C, MTN and Vodacom and the fourth was “Insurance”. Clearly none of them were useful to our reader or anyone else in Botswana.

So did Edgars make a plan to support her? No, they told her that they could not help, that there were no repair agents in Botswana and that all she could do was call the unreachable and wholly inappropriate South African numbers. When she told them she wanted our help she was told that Edgars would not talk to us.

We called Edgars in South Africa to ask for advice. We were told that she should take the phone back to the store. When we explained what had happened the supply of ideas ran dry.

Clearly Edgars do not understand the consumer rights situation in Botswana. The store from whom she bought the phone has failed to abide by Section 13 (1) (a) of the Consumer Protection Regulations by offering a product that is “not of merchantable quality” and Section 17 (1) (d) which forbids a store from “causing a probability of confusion or of misunderstanding as to the legal rights, obligations, or remedies of a party to a transaction”.

We’ll keep you updated. I’m sure Edgars are going to do the decent thing.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hello , am happy as I found that helpful information , because they annoyed me with phone calls , and i was about to believe them as they want around 3000$ to get my PhD .
so thank you for the furtive information that for sure will help to discover such a sneaky people.