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Spain’s Comision Nacional del Mercado de Valores has issued a securities fraud notice to Trust Investing. According to the CNMV’s April 4th warning, Trust Investing is not authorized to perform the investment services listed in Article 140 of the Spanish Securities Markets Act, which include investment counseling.
In other jurisdictions, this is the equivalent of a securities fraud warning.
The Trust Investing website domain referenced in the CNMV’s warning is “trustinvesting.github.io,” which is worth noting.
This is a GitHub Pages webpage that is “hosted directly” from a GitHub repo. I’m a little perplexed because Trust Investing’s original website, “trustinvesting.com,” is still up and running. In my opinion, the GitHub Pages site appears to have been set up by an affiliate.
A “starts now!” button can be seen in the top right corner of the GitHub Pages site. Clicking that appears to take you to a Trust Investing affiliate referral link that is broken. Trust Investing may have cancelled the affiliate’s account as a result of the CNMV’s fraud alert.
However, I’m not clear why the GitHub Pages site is still up. In any case, Spain’s cautionary note on trust investments comes after the arrest of executive Ruslan Concepcion in Cuba in April 2021.
Concepcion (right) was detained while attempting to board a flight to Russia. Concepcion was released by Cuban authorities in October 2021; I couldn’t find out what happened to him after that. Concepcion looks to be still in Cuba, based on his recent Facebook updates.
Cuba accounted for 44% of the traffic to Trust Investing’s website at the time of Concepcion’s arrest. Throughout 2022, SimilarWeb shows a renewed increase in visitors to Trust Investing’s website:
Since then, trust investor recruitment has stalled in Cuba. Brazil (17%), Italy (12%), Colombia (9%), and Peru (8%), among others, are currently supplying funds to the Ponzi scheme. Diego Chaves, the CEO of Trust Investing, is in charge (right).
Chaves has deactivated his social media profiles in response to the CNMV’s warning. We suspected Chaves was based in Spain when we examined Trust Investing in July 2020. It’s unknown whether he’s still in the country after the CNMV’s warning.
