Is StrongBox250 a Scam? | Website Review

StrongBox250 is a multi-level marketing company which claims that members can earn a daily profit by purchasing activity packages. These activities include clicking on advertising banners, answering surveys and more. New members can only join through the registration link of their ‘sponsors’, which makes StrongBox250 a multi-level marketing company.

StrongBox250 currently seems to be operating in Spain as most of the posts on their social media channels are in Spanish. The presentations provided on their website and Youtube channel show that the company is registered in Madrid and London.

Their communications centre on common MLM themes like ‘work from home’, ‘change your life’, ‘be your own boss’ and ‘financial security’.

Website Information

Official Domain
strongbox250.com

Registered on
2019-12-03

Location
Spain

Owner
Not provided

Only the information about the domain name, registration date and location is available, as other details have been protected by a privacy guard.

The website is in English, but there are quite a few spelling and grammar errors, and some traces of the original content being in Spanish. There errors do not inspire confidence in the company, as the website has been active for 8 months. StrongBox250 had more than enough time to fix them and such oversights do not help in portraying them as professionals.

There are some PDF documents provided on the website which are supposed to provide clarity on how you can earn money with StrongBox250. There is some incongruence in their claims, especially as the revenue-generation supposedly comes from doing menial activities which are usually outsourced to workers in developing countries for low wages. Meanwhile, StrongBox250’s entire pitch revolves around becoming a business owner and recruiting others. It is not clear how the activity packages relate to becoming a successful entrepreneur.

There are some confusing claims being made by the company. StrongBox250 says that they have tie-ups with advertising companies which pay them whenever ads are clicked. They claim that the activities which have to be performed to earn through their packages can be carried out manually or can be fully automated using their bots. They state that by performing the daily tasks, members can earn more money than they would through platforms like Google AdSense.

There are a few things wrong here. Firstly, Google AdSense is a platform which enables website owners to display ads on their website. The revenues from these ads are shared with Google and the website owner gets paid when the ads are clicked by visitors. It is not a platform where users can earn by clicking ads.

There exists a model called Affiliate Marketing, where businesses pay other businesses for generating traffic to their webpages. The objective of Affiliate Marketing is to bring in genuine visitors who generate revenue for the business. Visitors who blindly click ads to generate revenue for themselves are in no way considered genuine.

There is no mention by StrongBox250 of an affiliate marketing model being utilized, nor have they named their advertising partners.    

When users are directed to webpages solely to click on ads, or when bots are used for the same, it constitutes click fraud. Companies which hire a large number of workers to perform activities like clicking on ads, viewing videos, submitting forms and other tasks are known as click farms. Therefore, if StrongBox250 is claiming that they pay members to perform such tasks, they are admitting to being a click farm.

[Read more about Pay to Click Scams]

A simple analysis of the packages offered by StrongBox250 shows that they are essentially promising to double your investment in 250 days. This ROI is constant regardless of the package. The cheapest package costs €25 (or 25 Strong Points) and supposedly gives a daily return of €0.20, which is a total of €50 in 250 days. The most expensive package costs €100,000 (or 100,000 Strong Points) and pays €800 per day, which comes to €200,000 in 250 days. These returns seem highly unrealistic, more so for the kinds of work which usually pay a pittance. The packages have an activation cost of €10 and the cost of automating tasks is €30 per year.   

According to the FAQ page of website, payouts are given only in Bitcoin or Ethereum and there is a minimum withdrawal threshold of €50. This means that for any package costing less than €10,000, the member will have to work between 2 to 250 days to be eligible for a payout. StrongBox250 also charges a 5% withdrawal fee for every payout given.

As part of the multi-level marketing model, StrongBox250 provides four kinds of bonuses for recruiting team members under you:

·         Starting Bonus – Enroll a new member and earn 5% commission on their purchase

·         Triple Bonus – Enroll 3 members and earn 10% commission on their purchases

·         Career Bonus – Earn a bonuses between €30 to €1,000,000 for hitting Strong Point (SP) milestones

·         Binary Bonus – Earn 5% - 10% commission on the combined SP of your downlines

·         Awards – Gifts like Apple watches and Macbooks for earning between 15,000 SP to 100,000 SP, and vehicles and gold watches for earning between 500,000 to 25,000,000 SP

Apart from the packages listed earlier, there is also a Co-founder package available for early investors. The package cost was €1,500 before June 1, 2020. The company claims that there are only 100 Co-founder licenses available and members can earn a commission of 10% by selling these licenses. According to the company’s projects, Co-founders can earn €3,055 in 12 months from 9,000 customers, which is an ROI of 103.67%

The full emphasis of the company’s pitches are on portraying themselves as credible and explaining the earning opportunity by enrolling new members. The presentation was more than 36 minutes long and there was barely a mention, much less a demonstration, of the daily tasks to be performed. None of the other posts or videos make any mention of the tasks either.

Company Information

Email ID
info@strongbox250.com

Phone Number
+34 91 414 78 88

Address
85 Great Portland Street first floor- 94120. London, United Kingdom.

Owner
WESTHEAD, Elizabeth Penelope (Director)

Social Media Profiles
Facebook – Created on 5 December 2019: https://www.facebook.com/strongbox250official/
Twitter (Joined in March 2020): https://twitter.com/strongbox250
Instagram (First posted on 9 April 2020): https://www.instagram.com/strongbox250official/
Youtube –Joined on 7 December 2019: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_fYW-W9MYtNV3cs_SnnsWA

The social buttons on the website contain dummy links. The actual profiles are mentioned in one of their marketing presentations and could be found by searching the websites directly. The posts are mostly in Spanish. Some of the content on YouTube is translated in other languages such as English, Italian, French, Russian and Chinese. The registered office is in England, while the phone number carries a +34 country code which belongs to Spain.

As per the UK company registration information, Mrs Elizabeth Westhead is listed as the Director of the company. The same person is listed as the Director of 65 other companies and there is a second profile where she is connected to 54 more companies. For somebody being appointed to so many companies, her LinkedIn profile is nearly completely empty with only one connection. In many of these cases, she has been the Director for only a few months and the companies registered under her name all use the same few addresses. All this information suggests that Mrs Westhead is being used as a figurehead to set-up UK based companies for other people.

The names of four team members are mentioned on the website. The two main figures of the company are CEO Mario Aparicio and Marketing Director Olyeska Mathison.

The LinkedIn profile of Mario Aparacio mentions his location as Italy and not Spain or England. It is also stated on his profile that he was previously associated with the Russian gold investment bar multi-level marketing company SwissGolden, where he built a network of 200 members.

There are also some communications from 2017 in the form of a PR article and a Facebook post by the page ‘Swissgolden wonders NG’ which show that both Mario Aparicio and Olyeska Mathison were involved with SwissGolden. In the communication sent out by SwissGolden, both of them are named as ‘global leaders’ of the company. In the Facebook post, Mario and Olyeska are pictured with Max Lawrence, Marketing Director of SwissGolden.

Source

SwissGolden has been defunct since 2018 following a controversy in Nigeria involving a scam of NGN 3 Billion. Thousands of Nigerians filed a petition against SwissGolden and three individuals were arrested by Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) for defrauding over 7,000 Nigerians. Apart from two Nigerian nationals, they also arrested Russian national Maxim Lobaty, who seems to be none other than Max Lawrence.

However, the company simply shut shop for a few months and emerged again as SwissGold Market (sg.market), which was active as recently as June 2020 and currently seems to have shut down.

Mario also seems to have been involved with MiningVIP in 2019, which seems to be one of the cryptocurrency mining Pyramid schemes which have become common in recent years.

Scamadviser Verification

The Scamadviser page of StrongBox250 has not been claimed by the company. However, they have reached out in order to get themselves verified and the process is ongoing.

Scamadviser Trust Score

Scamadviser’s algorithms have given StrongBox250 a low Trust Score of 1%, indicating that it is extremely risky to get involved with this business. You can learn more about StrongBox250’s Trust score here.

Scamadviser User Reviews

User reviews of StrongBox250 are positive and seem to be from investors of the scheme. It has a rating of 3.5/5 based on 11 user reviews across Scamadviser, TrustPilot and Safe.Shop. There are also a number of comments left using the Facebook plugin on the website.

Most of the reviewers state that they believe Mario and the company to be trustworthy as they have received payouts. It should be noted that as StrongBox250 operates using a network marketing model, members are incentivized to maintain a good image of the company to prevent potential joiners from being dissuaded.

Many of the reviewers say that they have known Mario for five to ten years, which is much before StrongBox250 came into existence. It can be gathered from this information that they have been working with Mario since around the time he was associated with SwissGolden and MiningVIP.

There is also a tint of passive-aggressiveness in the reviews and they mention that negative reviews of the company are by competitors who want StrongBox250 to fail. There does not seem to be any basis for these claims, as almost all the negative reviews are by websites and blogs which check the authenticity of investment opportunities.

You can read the user reviews here.

Conclusion

There is a high likelihood that StrongBox250 is an HYIP scam.

StrongBox250’s pitches put the bulk of the emphasis on team building and commissions. The activity packages only seem to exist for the sake of providing the illusion of a tangible service, so that the company is not labeled as a Ponzi scheme.

The promise of 200% returns in 250 days is hard to believe and strengthens the suspicion that the company is an HYIP Scam. Online advertising alone definitely cannot generate the revenues which would be required to deliver these kinds of returns. The activities they claim to provide are fraudulent in nature. The activities are unlikely to exist at all as the company claims they can be fully-automated for a small extra fee, which means the investors only need to focus on earning commissions by enrolling new members.

It is common sense that any company which has a genuine revenue-generation model won’t require workers to pay for performing tasks. Therefore, it can be inferred that the only money coming into the company is from people paying for the packages.

Considering StrongBox250’s unbelievable claims for the earning potential, vague revenue-generation model and the management’s previous association with known pyramid schemes, there is a high possibility that StrongBox250 is an HYIP scam. It looks as though after getting a taste of the kind of money that can be made through these kinds of ventures, Mario Aparicio and Olyeska Mathison decided to start one of their own.

The claims of the reviewers that they have received payouts may be true as early investors of pyramid schemes do recover their investments. However, these schemes are unsustainable and their collapse is inevitable. A large majority of the investors in such opportunities end up with losses and only a few early investors make any profit.  

Pyramid schemes can gain momentum for years before eventually going bust. StrongBox250 is just a few months old. It would be advisable to avoid investing in this company as it has a high chance of being an HYIP scam.

Learn More

While not all multi-level marketing companies are scams, pyramid schemes often disguise themselves as MLM schemes in order to avoid legal authorities. Learn to recognize the signs that an investment or earning opportunity could be a scam:

What are High Yield Investment Programs (HYIPs)?

Multilevel Marketing Scams

Job & Employment Scams

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This article has been written by a scam fighter volunteer. If you believe the article above contains inaccuracies or is missing relevant information, please contact Scamadviser.com using this form.