Kickfurther.com Review – Read this before investing money
I have too many thoughts about this company and their performance in my portfolio. Today I finally decided to pen some of them down.
Introduction
First of all, Kickfurther is not a scam, its a company with a skewed business model. As I will explain below, as an investor you are the worst off in the equation, between the company, Kickfurther and you, you are the one that is most likely to lose money in my experience, especially if you keep investing. The POs, guarantees, UCC Liens mean nothing when shit hits the fan and you lose your entire principal.
Business Model
The business model is quite simple, you fund inventory for companies, companies sell through the inventory. Kickfurther takes two cuts, once at disbursement to the company and once during withdrawal. Note that there is some conjecture here in my business model paragraph since I have not seen the actual agreements and I have got to know that Kickfurther itself invested in at least one co-op.
Recently, a good majority of the last few companies I have invested in have not paid back.
The risk I did not expect
However its all part of the risk you would say, right? Well, its not so simple. The risk most investors including me signed up for is the risk of inventory not selling out. However in my experience, many companies actually sell off inventory and then refuse to pay back.
The model in my opinion encourages such “scams” for the lack of a better word by these companies. No action is taken against these companies by Kickfurther until buyers vote no confidence against this company. Usually a 50% threshold is required to make a co-op as cancelled. So many bad co-ops were not getting cancelled that Kickfurther has now pro-actively started doing affirmative votes. That’s actually one of the only steps where I think Kickfurther is working for investors in these unfortunate situations.
What happens when a company defaults? In my experience, you often times don’t get anything back. Kickfurther has stated that they have no obligation to sue the companies who refuse to pay. They end up sending the companies to a collection agency. These collection agencies in my experience end up with little success so investors have to write off their loss while Kickfurther has made their money and move onto the next company.
Kickfurther just hides the companies that don’t pay so its hard for you to figure out what’s happening overall on the platform, they often quote some research numbers but its of little solace to investors who are facing losses.
Example Failures – Kickfurther is broken!
Lets take a few examples of what happened (again its what is visible to me as an investor in these companies, reddit is a good source to see other egregious stories of scammers using Kickfurther including a case wherein the CEO Sean Clerq had to issue an apology).
- Company 1 – This company is super popular on the web for their equipment. I invested in it looking at its presence and almost certainty that it would sell through the inventory. It did, however the company initially denied any liability, then got onto a payment plan with a bulk payment at the end and then defaulted on that payment. This company is still active but they owe hundreds of thousands of dollars to investors.
- Company 2 – This company also seemed to have a decent web footprint, after selling through, the company shared how their payment would be a month late. After that they stopped updating and sent no response to Kickfurther. Guess what a few months later, this company sold all of its assets but not the liabilities (Wink wink). According to LinkedIn, all execs of the company quit. Kickfurther knew about the sale and despite being a creditor claims that it had no right to interfere in the sale. The collection agency is still collecting against the old company which actually may not even have assets. This incident is what broke the camel’s back for me. Its the first time I actually think I am sure Kickfurther does not give a damn about me as an investor. All detective work here was done by investors and Kickfurther had not even shared the sale information.
And these are just 2 examples, there are a lot of other examples wherein the company just didn’t pay even after selling the inventory and Kickfurther’s updates are only about collection agencies collecting against them. In many cases I have seen the companies continue to sell other things.
Final Thoughts
The model is inherently broken for individual investors, as Kickfurther has no incentive to get the money back if a company refuses to pay. The 1.5% withdrawal fee is a pittance against what would be required to get a judgement on a company. Despite the horrible recent performance new companies continue to get funded in days which shows me this hide the bad performers model is working.
So what’s the moral of the story?
If its too good to be true, it probably is. I don’t have the heart to do full math on my losses on the Kickfurther (yet) platform, but its significant with the 1.5% withdrawal fee and the companies I think would be permanent defaulters. I also have no clue on why these are not considered equity and under the SEC. I plan to ask the SEC that.
Be Prepared to lose your principal. Investment Rating:
 1.5/5
One of the reasons I am writing this is that sites like Trustpilot are flooded by experiences of companies who were able to get money via the platform and hence leave 5 star reviews. If I were to fathom a guess, I would say Kickfurther solicits reviews from these companies just due to the regularity with which these companies are posting on Trustpilot.
As I write this, I have thousands of dollars pending on the platform, keeping my fingers crossed for a Christmas miracle but not holding my breath.
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Thank you for sharing, i can not believe how little is known about people losing their money on Kickfurther. I lost thousands as well. Found the link on reddit
Can we talk about hiq solar please? What the fuck is wrong with kickfurther allowing the scam to happen?
X% of nothing is still nothing. For idiots who continue to use kickfurther , they are gluttons for loss. I have no idea what this platform’s role is in the process. I can get ripped off by companies that I hold bonds in without a middleman. At least then the tax work will be cleaner.
“investments” you make on Kickfurther, in my humble opinion, are much more risky than they may appear because if the only action KF is generally ever going to take is sending a collection agency after the company, and even then only after a prolonged period of time after a convoluted process of the buyers voting to do so, then there is very little incentive for the companies to make due on their debt to us because the consequences of them not doing so are slim to none.
They might not be able to do another co-op on Kickfurther, but the collection agencies have no meaningful claim on the business or the individuals therein, nor is there any real collateral that we have access to try to recoup our investments, so the company can walk away without paying without much, if any, of a penalty (both literally and figuratively).
I would recommend everyone to stay away from Kickfurther if they want to see their money ever again.
This platform does not provide any protections at all for the investors on the platform and their interests are not aligned with the interests of the investors. Many companies, including fraudulent companies, and companies that were set up using other people’s identities via identity theft, have entered the platform only to take 100% of the money that investors funded them with and then disappeared. This has been going on since at least 2015 or 2016. If you have not checked into this yet, you are advised to stay away unless you really don’t care about your money
Thanks Jon, my experience is the same. Like I said, if a company genuinely cant made it, i understand. What I find unacceptable is that Kickfurther has these companies come in, commit fraud and then walk way with investor money like nothing happened. Kickfurther just hides the company off their platform like it never happened. In all this fraud, only the investors lose their money.
Like you, Wisetechie, I’ve been on Kickfurther for a while and, at this point, merely hoping to minimize losses. As you point out, the risks are more than they seem. Further, even if you had a 100% success rate on all “co-ops”, you would have to profit enough to overcome the 1.5% fee on withdrawing your money from Kickfurther.
PS – I still have a difficult time understanding why Kickfurther isn’t treated more like the peer to peer lending platforms (eg, Prosper). The “alleged security interest” in goods/inventory before such inventory is ever created seems much more like a loan participation than anything else.
Same experience with them. Please folks do not invest in them.
@Roger – This is because they are flying under the radar, maybe US consumer protection agencies need to stand up and take notice,
Terrible platform and still borderline fraudulent in that they intentionally mask the true risk of investing in the platform by hiding funded consignments that are underperforming and limit communication across consignments through their supposed terms of service, arguing that consignments you have not funded bear no relevance to you. This is clearly false, as I don’t invest people who I know fail to pay others back, because I don’t TRUST them. In the same way, a credit card company doesn’t issue credit with people who have low credit scores. A credit score is a quantification of trustability. Hiding this information intentionally so as to increase rate of investors on the platform is unethical, and poses an argument for a class action suit.
investor beware / caveat emptor – not worth it
Kickfurther is an absolute scam – they get personal guarantees but never actually do anything with them. It’s all just a false sense of security for investors who they could give two shits about.
I can comment from the borrower side. This was a really horrible experience and one I will never repeat. We borrowed almost $1 million for four months for inventory. The original proposal was for an interest rate in the high teens (annualized). “Transparency†is not in the Kickfurther vocabulary and after all of the surprise and hidden fees, we ended up paying over 46% APR (above the legal limit). In addition, their reporting requirements were quite onerous.
The key to success when building a platform like this is an experience that users want to repeat on both sides of the equation. Sounds like they have very few users that want to repeat on either side of the equation.