March 5, 2022
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Table Of Contents:
In reviewing IPCapital we identified 3 core things that are to be adhered to and can be used to benchmark IPC performance:
a. Validity of trades
b. Credibility of company
c. Soundness of their policies
Any contravention of these 3 benchmarks, leads to questions on the respective criteria and I consider it as an incident that enters the registry. This is important to be alert as investors. Incidences can either be resolved or remain unresolved. Any resolved incident we will recategorize to Risk-Low any pending item will retain its original risk categorization.
Our risk category and actions are as follows based on our Risk-First approach:
a) Risk Low : Nothing to worry about
b) Risk Medium: Be on standby/alert
c) Risk High: Go/No go or Stay or No stay decision to be made.
Current Recommendation: High Risk — No Go.
This is based on the following:
1) lack of customer support
2) non payment of profit and bonuses for the week 22nd March 2022 to 25th March 2022,
3) rejection of withdrawals on 26th March 2022
4) loss of funds in USDT wallet on 26th March 2022 and
5) subscribing users to a new bot service on 29th March 2022 that locks 100% capital for 100 days without any contractual agreement in place or their consent.
The company should be transparent in its terms and conditions and ensure information is accessible in its back-office
Hidden info:
IPC launched an internal chat which they later withdrew and only used email which they hardly reply. There’s a critical need to resolve technical issues to reduce customer enquiry and to open more customer support channels to avoid customers being taken advantage of by hackers due to desperation to talk to support. In the internal chat, I had an experience where it was showing connection lost and advising I check on my internet connection. Even though I used my laptop, and phone and tried on Wifi and a different mobile network without any success. When I was finally able to successfully open 2 tickets, no response was given. As a consumer-facing business, they should invest more in their front office operations.
MT4 Withdrawals. Slow payout of MT4 Withdrawals due to MT4 Server issues. Company working on each withdrawal.
The company did an airdrop and as they say “no fixed number of users receiving the airdrop as all lucky winners will be randomly picked”. Goes contrary to their equality statement on their website. In a way, it simply means the company can determine who gets more transactions than the rest.
Slow updates on closed trades. Issue being said to be due to MT4 server congestion and upgrades ongoing. Reports accessible from IPC Back-office “Menu — Report”.
A technical glitch led to some accounts having excess funds sent to them. Accounts that received glitches of excess funds were audited and excess funds deducted and sent back to the source.
Upgrade done to create new deposit addresses with 2 extra networks added i.e. USDT (ERC20) & USDT (BEP20) to existing USDT (TRC20)
Takes around T + 2 (48 hours) for withdrawals to go through. I initiated withdrawal on 28th February 2022. It’s now taken 4 days as of 5th March 2022. The transaction shows pending but it has not been sent to the USDT network even though some upline is saying it’s due to network congestion, which isn’t the case as it’s not visible in tronscan.io and just shows processing from IPC backend. It’s good to note that some users have faster withdrawals even when they’re initiated afterwards. So there’s partiality in the withdrawal process.
Removal of customer-facing staff and the whole marketing team that was assisting with support. Their support still remains non-operational. Looks like a bunch of techies running a startup who despise the essence of good customer service. This draws a question to their long term commitment on being an ongoing concern.
These were after the following videos by respective people, which personally I found to be okay and true approaching the company from a risk-first perspective:
Eddie :
Nate :
Lack of double-entry transactions. The debit of MT4 trading account without a matching Credit transaction in USDT wallet. These contravene the rule of double-entry, making their accountability process questionable. The company may be having suspense accounts from which they pay. This draws questions on the validity of their trading and the ability of the bot to generate profit.
It’s simple if the company has generated profits why is it that they require an approval process to authorize withdrawals. Do they have to check if they have enough money in order to pay? Raises a lot of questions over whether they’re paying from profits generated from trading.
Website not reachable. No communication from the company of why the website isn’t reachable.
The company through an official statement purported that a security breach resulted in loss of 80% of their funds and compromise of data and statistical analysis of the bot. The company says it will repay user’s trading capital from its own funds. Well the trading capital from the site that is amount following has still remained over 400m$ so it’s clear, it didn’t lose 80% of trading capital in the platform but rather of profits and bonuses. The amount that is still missing or unpaid is the weekly profits and bonuses, withdrawals are getting rejected. Initially the weekend before, the company said that there will be no withdrawals due to MT4 API upgrade. So for 2 weekends, the first being prior to launch of Master-C bot the next after launching it, no profits have been paid. Now the management is saying that they will be making adjustments to the management bonus definitely a way to get people to recruit more people and perhaps make payment from new deposits.
Validity of trading is now questionable
Credibility of the company is now questionable
Soundness of their policy is now questionable
This is based on the following, it let go some staff based on a breach of contractual obligations but the same company is in breach of its own contractual obligations to its customers by subscribing them to a new service without their consent. *Credibility of the company, Soundness of their policies
It also looks like the company may have incurred significant losses during its trading. Most of its trades are counter-trend and venturing into crypto a highly volatile asset class with a scalping strategy wasn’t a good move. Especially at a time when the trend was changing. *Validity of trading, Soundness of their policies
To venture to new products like the new Master-C bot and IPCloud while they can’t even manage transaction speed, faster withdrawal and security of systems and funds is a bad move. This is made worse by removing a good service that yielded great returns. What’s not broken don’t fix. So if they say it’s because of a data breach of parameters, that means they don’t have even a backup for their core service so where’s the credibility of having a new service?