Envestio Peer-to-Peer Vanishes with My Money
I was just putting the finishing touches on my next blog post detailing how much money I had earned through Peer-to-Peer investments in 2019. Then, through my subscription to the P2P-Banking I caught wind of what has just happened with one of the platforms I am subscribed to. Envestio is offline. Their website is down and there are reports that the COO has vanished from all social media sites like LinkedIn.
What Happened With Envestio?
This article gives a good overview on happened so far and it was already updated with a few edits at the bottom of the page showing the latest developments:
Millions at Stake in Envestio case – Investors Calling for Answers
I also came across this other article on Gatevnotes which gives an in-depth technical analysis of the Evestio domain, app and servers and suggests why all these things point to foul play.
So Whats the Damage?
This is my first real burn with investing but thankfully it is relatively small. Whats the damage? Just under €500. From a purely financial point of view, its not a lot.
Envestio Account Value Lost
It's Much Worse For Others
I follow Jørgen Wolf’s blog at FinanciallyFree.eu and he has a very significant amount of money invested with Envestio. His page about the platform was recently updated with a surprisingly clam reaction, stating:
“Looks like Envestio disappeared with our money 🙁”
Looking at Jørgen Wolf’s portfolio of over €290,000 we can see that just over 30,000 was invested with Envestio. This represents 10% of his portfolio that has seemingly just vanished. This is a disgusting betrayal of trust on the part of Envestio and I feel very sorry for Mr. Wolf and all the other investors who appear to have been defrauded.
So how did I react?
Given that it was a relatively small amount of money and no major loss, I was calm. I reminded myself about my approach when I first got into this stuff, “Only invest what you can afford to lose.” Plus, I knew that Peer-to-Peer investing was a riskier asset class because it was relatively new. A lot of the platforms operate in countries that don’t have strict financial regulation or none at all for this type of operation.
I followed the advice issued here by the ECN and I emailed the police with a complaint and details of how much money I had lost. Reports say that there is no investigation underway at the time of posting this article.
This cash wasn’t critical to my grand plan for financial independence. However, I am currently at an important stage in my F.I. plan and the money which I have in P2P is now needed as cash. Because of this and a slight worry I now have about the legitimacy of some of the other platfroms I am invested in, I logged into my P2P accounts and made a few small withdrawals.
This was part of the plan anyway. This money will be put directly into my savings account. I will go into more detail about what I will be doing with the capital I have in P2P platforms in my next post.
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