The website aimtrust.com promises guaranteed daily gains for investors ranging from 0.5% up to 3%. Those who invest $20+ are promised 0.5% per day, and those who invest $100,000+ are promised 2.1% per day.
Some naive youngsters with limited financial experience may imagine that such returns are possible. In reality, a good investment may produce those sort of percentage returns on a monthly basis - if things are going well and provided the investor or fund manager has the skill to switch from one sector to another as required. If a trader was really capable of making such daily gains, they would trade on their own account rather than allow inexperienced people with a few tens of dollars to reap the rewards.
Ponzi schemes initially pay off some of the earlier investors with new money that is sucked into the program, but they inevitably collapse when the incoming funds dry up. The AIM Trust's spokesperson Jane F. Jee, who uses the handle JaneJee at multiple forums and also appears as Sincerely yours, Jane, is already concocting excuses to delay or avoid paying investors' gains, such as "due to a serious DDOS attack our server had experienced a strong failure in the database which led then to the fact that some number of investors' yields were not timely accrued and paid".
It sounds like someone has come up with the ideas of DDOS attacks, servers, and databases, and decided to throw them together in the hope that it would sound like a credible excuse - for a company that is supposedly able to generate returns of over 2% per day.
A related site, theinvestblog.com, purports to be a blog operated by "Helen" who "discovered" the AIM Trust. She says she makes $2,000 - $3,000 per day from it, after having wiped out her debts in a couple of months. "Helen", who claims to have divorced five years ago, is obviously a shill persona constructed for aimtrust.com. Like JaneJee, "Helen" frequently comes up with a peculiar turn of phrase, but "Helen's" English is worse, e.g. "The kid with me, and making all ends meet was a horrible task to do at first, for I had long stopped working anymiore (sic) after my daughter was born". When asked at that blog post how she came to have such a unique "grammatical style", she replied that her father was a "universal gambler" and her mother was a stylist, and that was why she was so "unpredictably unexpected". There's more about "Helen" here.
A company capable of generating a return of more than 2% per day should be rich enough to employ someone who can write a few pages of English for a website. Here are some examples from the AIM Trust FAQ:
2.17. Is your site safe?Yes, it is absolutely safe, meaning that it has been safeguarded by all modern techniques possible. Total safety is impossible, as you might bet, for we are not Gods, but we do everything what depends on us.
2.18. Are you a HYIP?
No, we are not.
We work in the oil-and-gas manufacturing pipe industry for years. We don't deviate from our principal sphere of operations in getting high returns. And we know this market well to have hoped that we did right steps on it.
There are plenty of internet characters posing as satisfied investors who think AIM Trust is great. Aimtrust.biz handles the pyramid scheme element, whereby investors are paid to recruit others into the scheme.
The aimtrust.com Ponzi scheme and theinvestblog.com spam are exposed at this page:
http://www.securitywatch.co.uk/2009/08/24/theinvestblogcom-spam-and-aimtrustcom-ponzi-scheme-fraud/
As the above link reveals, theinvestblog.com is hosted in Belarus, and one tactic exploited by these fraudsters to attract investors is "referrer spamming". The spammers send false referrer information to many websites, so that curious webmasters notice the referring page in their logs and go over to look at the sites. The Aim Trust fraudsters hope that visitors to their sites will be tempted by the possibility of easy profits. And sites that publish their access logs end up linking to the spammers' websites, so that after being indexed by the search engines, these links provide the spam sites with improved search engine placement. Variously described as AimTrust or Aim Trust, the scam is mentioned elsewhere, such as here. Another realist explains here that "you can only get scammed by Aim Trust".
At least some of the referrals have an IP that traces to Amsterdam, with the ISP being Ecatel Ltd. A similar Ponzi scheme is operated by biotechinvfund.com, which is also linked to Ecatel.
Aimtrust.com is not to be confused with aim-trust.com which is based in Indonesia, or with The Aim Trust plc / Galatial Ace plc associated with Jon Peter Pither, or with a multitude of companies with the suffix AiM VCT plc, indicating a venture capital trust quoted on London's Alternative Investment Market. The "AIM" of aimtrust.com denotes "Alternative Investment Management".
What sort of people would operate a Ponzi scheme like aimtrust.com - could it be the Nazis? The Vatican? Maybe the Mafia? The Muslims? Or perhaps even the Seventh-day Adventists or the David House Fellowship? Regular readers of WakeUpFromYourSlumber.com will not be surprised to learn that, like Bernie Madoff, it's none of those. The website aimtrust.com provides us with some clues.
28th February, Purim, Jews celebrate their liberation!Source25 February 2010, Thursday
This year's Purim falls on the 28th of February, and it is celebrated across the world by Jews as a festival that commemorates how Jewish people were saved in the ancient Persian Empire. According to the legendary story, Persian Emperor decides to kill all Jews. But the people was (sic) rescued by Emperor's wife, Esther. This whole story's details are described in the Holy Bible (Torah), which Jews this day publicly read.
AimTrust congratulates Jews all over the world with this holiday, and wishes Jewish people happiness and peace.
This is a day-off, according to our Calendar, thus no yields will be accrued.
So AimTrust is not only pro-Jewish; the company even uses Purim as an excuse to avoid paying one day's yield! That's provided they do pay out to anyone, before the scheme collapses. Now to be fair, their "no yield accrued because of a holiday" days don't just include Jewish holidays. They also include Christmas Day, Boxing Day, Martin Luther King's birthday, and Britain's August Bank Holiday. Whilst more in keeping with the Jewish reputation for parsimony, that would slightly negate AimTrust's pro-Jewish slant in celebrating Purim. However, AimTrust also celebrates Rosh Hashanah, Sukkot, Yom Kippur, and Hanukkah, but they don't celebrate any Islamic holidays!
A prominent individual involved with AimTrust gives his name as Mark Goldstein. The aimtrust.net website declares him to be the CEO of AimTrust, but he is sometimes downgraded to the "support manager", as at this Russian page that names Robin Katz as the firm's "customer care" operative and gives a Panama City address. That's two very Jewish names.
In this interview, Goldstein is coy about his position as CEO of AimTrust. Instead, he describes himself as the Support Team Chief and the Marketing and Public Relations Director at AIM. He names some other individuals involved with AIM, and there is a Joseph Zabronsky mixed in with several non-Jewish names.
The Florida-based Authorized Movers, Inc. provides another example in which Jewish ownership of a website was revealed by its content. The operators posted an article about Scientologists in Israel, promoted Israeli real estate, ran an article about Jewish singles and dating, featured several articles about "flight schools" including one about a "program to assist international students in locating and applying to U.S. flight schools", and linked to an article about the assassination of a Russian banker who had led a campaign against money laundering and corruption. Even without knowing that Shmuel Ovadia is the President and registered agent of Authorized Movers, Inc., or that Ovadia used a Hollywood, Florida address in 2003 when trading under the name Moving Express, Inc., it was already quite obvious that it wasn't the Nazis, the Jesuits, the Chinese, the Greeks, the Buddhists, the Koreans, etc, who were behind Authorized Movers.
AimTrust is registered in Panama under the name Safe Assets S.A., a "licensed Panamian company". Such an operation might be safe enough for the proprietors. However, participants who regarded their investments as "safe" may be in for a big disappointment.
Submitted by Poseidon on Wed, 2010-03-10 01:20
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