In February a popular online investment company Genius Funds was banned by the British Columbia Securities Commission to trade in any securities in B.C. The executive director of the BCSC issued a temporary order against the company. The order also banned Genius Funds from engaging in any investor relations activities in the province.

The order came after BCSC staff was alerted that a Vernon-area individual had recently wired $25,000 to the company.

According to the BCSC notice “Genius Funds is making misrepresentations to investors because it offers a rate of return that is impossible to earn consistently through legal means.”

As is known Genius Funds offers one investment fund that makes payments of up to 1.9 per cent daily, and a second fund that makes payments of up to nine per cent weekly. Today a lot of people make money online with Genius Funds. In addition, the notice says Genius Funds states that it offers the Genius High-Yield Deposit Account that earns depositors interest between 14 per cent and 25 per cent monthly.

The notice also reported that in fact “Genius Funds is not registered to participate in B.C.’s securities industry. The notice alleges that Genius Funds has breached, and continues to breach, securities laws by carrying out unregistered activity in the province.”

Meantime, these days users of the online investment project have reported that they could not access the website of Genius Funds and some reported they could not withdraw their funds to their e-currency accounts.

One user posted his message on the online forum of the hyip monitor website Hyipexplorer.com:

I had a problem with my account and I've emailed support more than 3 days ago. Until now I have not got any reply from them. I used Live Chat and the support representative said it takes around 24 hours to 48 hours for support to reply. I've waited until now and still I have got no reply from them. Live chat repeatedly asked me to not worry and that a reply should be imminent. Now when I try to access the site it fails to load. Does anyone know what is going on and whether if your emails to support is answered? I'm trying to sell my EMGF shares and because I forgot my TPIN my account got blocked. That is the problem I emailed to support. I've waited well over 150 days for my shares to mature and now since support won't answer me and the site being unreachable, I'm beginning to wonder if I'm ever going to withdraw my funds.

GoldPoll monitor has even more negative comments from Genius Funds users.

Today they posted such comments:

scince 8 march i did not
receive my weekly payment
..they just paying the small
investors down $100 ..how can
we accept their new investment
offer ..if they did not pay
till now !! we wish GF long
long life ..but it show
unstable these days ..

5days now still pending on my
payout, 400usd. what is the
real problem, GF?

what happened with GF? Is it
SCAM now? I didnt receive my
0,93$ dayly payment!

Date: 08/03/10
Type: liberty reserve transfer
out (pending)

Withdraw pending for 4 days
$67.10

Could these events be related to each other? Have Genius Funds turned into a scam project after all?

This remains unclear because HYIP monitors continue to rate Genius Funds as the top investment online project with many users keeping on to invest their e-currencies in it. It is still considered as paying.

On the other hand one member on the Hyip.com forum disputes the HYIP monitor’s opinion as the final and most objective instance: “Put it this way, any program that depends on monitors alone (resources comes from people) is probably 'ponzi' (this is a speculative statement) .....programs that don't are probably NOT. They will perform despite what monitors had to say because they have their own compliance standards to follow as required by their legal jurisdiction. EU base offshore financial institution are damn strict with their financial regulations.”

Many advocates and fans of the company allege that problems with the withdrawals are just related to maintenance problems and in fact online investors do receive their funds after these glitches on the website.

On such user wrote: “For Christ sake people...if u dont have any proof than dont say that it is a scam! I have been waiting for my wire transfer withdrawal for a couple of weeks and I had good support over email and it looks like they have solved the problem now. If u have any sense at all than u should realize that complaining in this room wont solve your problems! In contrary ! You would just undermine faith in a company that has always payed! So think twice before accusing them of being a false company!”

Interestingly, Genius Funds does not offer wire transfers as a withdrawal option.

Ecommerce-Journal has sent its questions to the administration of Genius Funds but the company failed to respond and provide any explanations to what is really happening at once.

Later Ecommerce-Journal received this response from Genius Funds:

Dear Ecommerce Journal,

Due to technical difficulties experienced by our servers over the past two weeks, our compliance department decided to cancel all pending payments and have clients resubmit them.

As a result, the accounting department is overloaded processing payments for the past week and some of our investors are experiencing delays with current transfers. We will get on track with all the withdrawals as soon as possible.