CFI Euro S.L., a company incorporated in Barcelona, Spain, has rebranded its gifting scheme operation under the name Community Collect. The new platform, which saw its domain "community-collect.com" updated on May 8th, 2018, directly succeeds the Crowdfunding International platform. This change occurred amid a significant drop in traffic for the original scheme.
Community Collect's website offers no details about its direct owners or operators. The domain's initial registration dates back to December 2017. The recent update in May suggests a transfer of control, coinciding with a reported increase in website traffic for Community Collect this month.
A copyright notice in the Community Collect website footer attributes the site to "© 2015 – 2018 CFI Euro S.L." This Spanish shell company also operated the Crowdfunding International gifting scheme. Further evidence linking the two operations includes a "sublicense" document hosted on the Community Collect domain, which references the "CFI" abbreviation commonly used by Crowdfunding International.
Crowdfunding International, launched in late 2015, functioned as a gifting scheme. Reports from 2016 suggested the scheme originated from a group of operators in the Netherlands. Such schemes typically involve participants "gifting" money to earlier entrants, with no actual product or service exchanged. These structures are illegal pyramid schemes, relying on a continuous influx of new participants to pay off previous ones.
New visitors to the Community Collect website encounter a message from "Dear Project Manager" explaining the reboot. The message cites "improving and restricting our platform" and advice from "advisors, lawyers, legislators, Project Managers and the courts." It claims a new concept, Community Collect, will make it "easier for the company to find partners, like Payment Service Providers, because over the last years the name crowdfunding got a bad image."
While banking issues are common for illegal schemes, traffic statistics for the Crowdfunding International website show a steady decline starting in July 2017. This suggests the scheme faced a collapse due to participant attrition, rather than merely banking difficulties or a damaged brand image. The rebranding likely aims to attract new members under a different name, sidestepping the negative reputation and dwindling participant base of the original.
Community Collect offers no retailable products or services. Affiliates only market membership itself, requiring new participants to "gift" money to join the scheme. This lack of legitimate retail sales is a hallmark of pyramid or gifting schemes, where revenue primarily comes from recruitment fees.
The compensation plan for Community Collect reduces the minimum buy-in from Crowdfunding International's €200 EUR to €50 EUR. A higher €100 EUR gifting tier is also available. Crowdfunding International utilized a 2x7 matrix to track gifting payments. Community Collect also appears to use a matrix structure, though its specific size remains undisclosed on the company's website or in its marketing materials.
Participants must re-gift a percentage of payments received back into Community Collect. The scheme specifies "57/57" at the €50 EUR tier and "30/30" at the €100 EUR tier, though whether these represent percentages of euro amounts or other metrics is not made clear. These re-gifting requirements ensure funds circulate within the scheme, further enriching early participants and the operators. Gifting schemes, regardless of their name or branding, are considered unlawful in most jurisdictions, including Spain, where CFI Euro S.L. is registered. Regulators worldwide have issued warnings against such money circulation schemes, which inevitably lead to the majority of participants losing their initial contributions.