Red Black's reviews - Smart Money People

No USA allowed yet located in the USA. Suspicious.

1

This site has recently banned all USA members from anything except paying existing loans off and withdrawing money. The note on the page saying it's a "focus on serving emerging markets" is a lie according to customer support. The real reason is "unclear legal standings" of bitcoins and "unclear jurisdiction of the blockchain" in the USA. The problem is that as BTCjam is located in the USA they are still under all USA laws even without USA users being allowed. This is super fishy. What are they trying to do? Exploit loopholes? Move things offshore? Bitcoin laundering? Either way it doesn't look like a safe place to put money any more. Reviewed on: 30th April 2016

Many defaults, inflated estimates.

1

Their statistics page isn't listed for a reason: many people here are seeing up to 25% overdue or defaults on this site. Most people only invest in listings to resell them at markup to people who don't know what they're doing. Savy is also very slow loading when it works at all. Reviewed on: 29th April 2016

So many fees! Also fees may increase at any time

1

I was considering this site until I found their buried Terms of Service and read it. Folk2Folk appears to have all clients (borrower and lender alike) pay for their own credit checks and anti-money laundering checks despite the fact that most sites do this for free. In fact, everything that could be a cost is passed on to the user directly. There is a £225 fee to release funds from this site on top of all of this. According to the terms of service more fees may be added and fees may rise at any time. Reviewed on: 15th April 2016

Hard to get verified, bad interest rates, and open during banking hours only.

2

To be verified you will need to physically mail in official copies of banking statements, your ID, and other personal information with public notary stamps on it. If you do online statements you can not be verified here as those will not count. Without verification it is impossible to invest here. The interest rates are only so-so and the better long-term rates do not offer compound interest. On top of it all, the company is only available during banking hours! There are much better places for investing that are easier to work with, easier to use, and with better interest rates. Reviewed on: 15th April 2016

Feels fishy. Look at the reviews!

1

My first red flag was seeing an incentive to invest in huge letters on the main page. Why would a good site need to give kickbacks? Then I saw the reviews here were mostly by the same people, one of which even gave a referral address. Referral addresses are a bad sign as it means that users are expected to get money out of other users and not their investments. Two of the positive reviews came from the same guy. Stay away! Reviewed on: 15th April 2016

Nice site, but not a lot going on. No cryptocurrency allowed.

2

Invest&Fund is a very basic investing site with few options and little traffic. With few loans open for investing (zero at the time of posting) and very few notes on sale, there are far more active places online. Currency only, no cryptocurrencies. Reviewed on: 15th April 2016

Reply from Hi RedBlack, Thanks for taking the time to leave us a review; we’re glad you like our site design. We apologise if you could not find the loans you were looking for - but we can assure you that we have a number of new Borrower applications in the pipeline which should be available to lend to soon. We would also like to make you aware of our Resale Marketplace, a place where Lenders can buy and sell loan parts which have already been successfully funded on our Lending Marketplace. At the time of writing we have a number of loans that are for sale. In regard to cryptocurrency – unfortunately, we cannot facilitate this on our platform at the moment and we have no immediate plans to put this in place. However, we constantly review the accessibility of our system and your comments have been passed on. If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us on [email protected] or 01424 717564. Kind regards, Invest & Fund Response date: 12th May 2016

Professional Site, but few investment opportunities

3

SavingStream is one of the few sites I have seen has full coverage in case of defaulted loans. Sadly, it doesn't have many loans going on with zero available at the time of posting. It is also all bank transfer with no cryptocurreny options. Reviewed on: 15th April 2016

UK only and bank account required!

1

Even though it looks nice and professional, I quickly found out this site is UK only! I wish I had found this out before getting most of the way down the sign up page. It also requires a bank account which is unusual for bitcoin lending sites. Reviewed on: 15th April 2016

Barebones but clean

3

Stemfund is a very simple site with few options, few pages and little going on. This does make investing easy, however, if you're looking to do anything else you will be out of luck! I do like that they have a clear "defaulted loans" list to help weed out bad borrowers. This is a very nice thing for any site to have. Reviewed on: 15th April 2016

Garish site, but good services.

5

I joined BtcPop looking for a replacement for a different peer to peer lending site. My first impression was shock at all the bright colors and buttons! Once I adjusted to the garishness, I quickly found that BtcPop has a lot of features my old site didn't offer ranging from savings accounts to IPO investing. There have been glitches and growing pains involved, but so far nothing has caused me to lose money. I guess glitches are the cost of being on a Beta site. Overall, despite the glitches, garishness, and difficulty in navigation, I have been happy with BtcPop and am looking forward to seeing how it grows as it leaves Beta and hits it's stride. Reviewed on: 15th April 2016