alliexfinancial.com / Alliexfinancial Ltd "Legal Registered Investment company" spam (is it a scam?)

A slightly odd spam, sent to a scraped email address:

From:     Dirk Nunes [flamwood888@gmail.com]
Date:     5 August 2013 10:54
Subject:     Legal Registered Investment company
Signed by:     gmail.com

alliexfinancial Ltd                                                                                                       Our advantages :

Legal Registered Investment company

Guaranteed Return on Investments

Principal Deposits Protection

Trustwave Trusted Commerce Seal

Extended Validation SSL Certificate

DDoss Protected Dedicated Server

Instant Withdrawal Processin                                                                JOIN NOW https://alliexfinancial.com/?ref=flamwood
Description:
Alliexfinancial Ltd is the UK registered legal international investment company. The company was created by a group of qualified experts, professional bankers, traders and analysts who specialized in the stock, bond, futures, currencies, gold, silver and oil trading with having more than ten years of extensive practical experiences of combined personal skills, knowledge, talents and collective ambitions for success.

plans:

2.2% for 7 days ( 115.4% total return)
Plan Spent Amount ($) Daily Profit (%)%)
Plan 1 $1 - $500 2.20


2.5% for 14 days (135% total return)
Plan Spent Amount ($) Daily Profit (%)%)
Plan 2 $10 - $1,000 2.50


2.7% for 21 days (156.7% total return)
Plan Spent Amount ($) Daily Profit (%)%)
Plan 3 $10 - $2,500 2.70


3% daily for 60 days (280% total return)
Plan Spent Amount ($) Daily Profit (%)%)
Plan 4 $10 - $50,000 3.00

  JOIN NOW https://alliexfinancial.com/?ref=flamwood    Inline image 1

The link to alliexfinancial.com/?ref=flamwood looks very much like an affiliate link, given the close match to the spammer's email address. The target site does not appear to be malicious according to URLquery.

So, what is alliexfinancial.com? It appears to be some sort of HYIP (High-Yield Investment Program) that offers up to 3.0% return on a investement.. per day.

Are these return rates sustainable? My personal opinion is that I can't see how it would be possible.

So who is this company. The website states "Alliexfinancial Ltd is the UK registered legal international investment company" which is a bit ungrammatical. It also quotes the apparently valid phone number of +44 161 7110107 which is a Manchester number.

I was interested to find that Alliexfinancial Ltd is a registered company at Companies House in the UK:

ALLIEXFINANCIAL LTD
ADVANTAGE BUSINESS CENTRE
132-134 GREAT ANCOATS STREET
MANCHESTER
ENGLAND
M4 6DE
Company No. 07892518

This details match the WHOIS details of the domain precisely:

ALLIEXFINANCIAL LTD
Paul Aleckson
Email:admin@alliexfinancial.com
132-134 GREAT ANCOATS STREET
ADVANTAGE BUSINESS CENTRE
M4 6DE MANCHESTER
United Kingdom
Tel: +44.1617110107

 The domain was registered in December 2009, so it has been around for a little while. The website is proxied by Cloudflare, but I think that the underlying IP address is probably 31.204.130.25 (i3d, Netherlands).

One problem - there's no such company listed on the Financial Services Register, although they do claim to be regulated in the UK:

Alliexfinancial Ltd activities are regulated by the United Kingdom international business authorities and complies with the United Kingdom legislation.

So, if they're not on the Register I am frankly a bit puzzled as to who their regulator is. They do not quote any reference number. However, they are not listed as being an unauthorised firm either.

One other problem - Companies House says that the company was incorporated in 2011, but the site claims they have been active for at least three years (i.e. since 2010):

For the last three years, the amount of funds managed by us has reached an enormous rate that is important to the company's growth and its stability. We are doing our best to make successful forecasts, and our traders work nearly 24 hours a day to make a more stable profit both for us and our investors. 

Perhaps this is an unregulated scheme? I'm not that much of a legal expert in these things, but I do note that the FCA has cautionary guidance on unregulated collective investment schemes (UCIS). In partciular you cannot recommend a UCIS to the general public, and a spam email sent to a scraped address certainly seems to be an attempt to enrol the public into such a scheme.

So, who runs Alliexfinancial Ltd? The Companies House Director's Report [rtf] mentions a sole director, 28 year old Ukranian national Mr Vladimer Ganaga (it's an odd transliteration, I'd expected Vladimir Ganaga to be a more literal way of writing Владимир Ганага). Apart from an NSFW Vkontakte page there's not much verifiable information.

I'm not a financial adviser, but I certainly wouldn't invest any money in this scheme. Do you have any experiences with it? If you do, perhaps you would consider leaving a comment below (all comments are the responsibility of their owners).

Update 12/9/13: in the past couple of days the Alliexfinancial site went offline and payments to investors stopped. No surprises there!