How could a Premier League club ever take on a sponsor like this?
Fulham dump partner after MoS uncover outlandish financial claims and ‘staff’ who were actually actors
FULHAM last night dramatically terminated one of their newest commercial partnerships after an investigation by The Mail on Sunday found the firm ‘guranteed’ improbable financial returns to people in some of the world’s poorest nations.
Titan Capital Markets has used the club’s brand and Premier League status repeatedly to establish their legitimacy and guaranteed ‘at least’ 480 per cent annual profits to attract investors across Africa and the Asian-Pacific.
Our investigation also found that one of the glossiest promotional videos for Titan Capital Markets — trumpeted as Fulham’s ‘CFD Trading Partner’ last summer by the club — is populated largely by actors. Some of those portrayed in the video as key staff members at Titan’s HQ in Australia are in fact models and voiceover artists.
After this newspaper presented our shocking findings to the club, and asked a series of detailed questions about the partnership, Fulham binned Titan. A club spokesman said yesterday: ‘The agreement between Fulham and Titan Capital Markets has been terminated.’
Fulham fans had expressed their dismay that the club’s name was being ‘abused’ by Titan. But our revelations are just the latest in a series of scandals around agreements between elite English football clubs and apparently dubious financial partners.
Titan executives claim guaranteed returns of ‘at least’ seven per cent per fortnight, or nearly 500 per cent per year, a scarcely credible amount for a legitimate company. One senior figure at Titan, Emmanuel Bannor, in charge of African operations, told us that since the company was formed in August, ‘more than 150,000 people are joining each month’.
He added that, since the company started trading in Forex (foreign exchange markets) in August, they had already attracted total investment of $300million. The MoS have not been able to corroborate these claims.
Titan, whose nominal HQ is in Canberra, is currently under investigation by regulatory bodies in Australia over fears it made misleading claims to potential investors. Its website has recently been geo-blocked in the UK, the United States and
Australia. The company is not regulated in the UK.Bannor told the MoS: ‘Our company is targeting the AsiaPacific region, Thailand, Vietnam and the whole of Africa... you guys (in the UK) have strict regulations. The UK regulators are strict on websites and we’ll need to get a licence to (lift the geo-block).’ Titan representatives invoke their relationship with Fulham in all their marketing. In one online seminar last week, potential investors were given several reasons for ‘saying a big yes’ to Titan. Prominent among these messages were: ‘TITAN is in partnership with an English Premier League Club
CLUB OWNER: Shahid Khan named FULHAM FOOTBALL CLUB. No football club will partner with a fake project and they would have run a check to be sure the company is real before allowing the company to sponsor them.’
Titan’s head of sales in Ghana, Coach Gideon, told the MoS: ‘The world is full of scams but this is a solid project. The reason we are so passionate is that Titan gives you value for money. Forex is now a solid platform where people can make millions of dollars. Titan is giving you the tools to make lots of money.
‘For Titan to partner with Fulham, the oldest football club in England, shows that Titan has the ability to survive as a long-term project.’
Fulham are London’s oldest professional club, as opposed to England’s. Titan executives also made other claims to the MoS that do not stand up to scrutiny.
One is that Titan is regulated globally by a firm called WikiFX. In fact WikiFX is a web-based firm that acts as an aggregation tool of Forex traders, telling users which companies are good and which are bad. It has no regulatory powers.
A second claim by Titan is that, in partnership with WikiFX, it offers a unique ‘Eye Protection Centre (EPC) program’, whereby all Titan investors can claim up to $3,000 if their investments fail for any reason or Titan go bust.
Titan executives told the MoS this week: ‘With our EPC, you literally cannot lose. We can make so much money together.’
It is unconfirmed whether the EPC is actually in place. An old article on the WikiFX website talks about it as a possibility, with the brokers rather than WikiFX underwriting it. No details have been supplied to the MoS to confirm this.
In messages sent by a Titan agent in Nigeria last week, to a Whats-App group of 74 people being ‘mentored’ by this agent, they were told: ‘TITAN is a business you can put your money in to work for you, then go to sleep. I am looking forward to working with as many persons willing to say a big yes and join me to help many souls out of poverty via this business concept. And also, make huge amount of money as well.’
In Titan’s slick promotional video, as well as in written marketing literature, many of those named as employees are largely actors.
A character called Scott Gibson, supposedly Titan’s chief technology officer, is in fact a voiceover specialist and actor from Malaysia. His real name is Daryl and he is also a singer in a punk band. He confirmed to the MoS he was hired by a production company to film the Titan promo — effectively a work of fiction — at a location in Malaysia this year.
Characters that ‘Scott Gibson’ introduces as Titan mathematicians, analysts and engineers are, in fact, catalogue models and people hired for the shoot.
Titan executives working across Africa last week offered a MoS reporter a role as a regional agent for Titan in the UK within 30 minutes, and promised commission of 10 to 15 per cent per person recruited to use Titan’s services.
Titan are open about the fact their business is a ‘multi-level marketing’ scheme, which is, in effect, a pyramid model, where new recruits get commission for hiring more people. Titan says its business model works first by charging between $30 and $300 for ‘academy’ lessons in how to become a trader in foreign exchange markets; and second by using investors money to play the markets.
Some Fulham fans became concerned about the club’s relationship with Titan last month after Martin Calladine, an author specialising in wrongdoing in football, blogged about anomalies in Titan’s history.
Tom Greatrex, chairman of the Fulham Supporters’ Trust, told the MoS on Friday: ‘Many Fulham fans will be aghast at the way the reputation of the club has been allowed to be sullied by association with Titan,’ he said. ‘It runs counter to everything (owner) Shahid Khan states his ownership of Fulham stands for.’ It is understood Fulham used a thirdparty firm to conduct due diligence on Titan and found no red flags.
English clubs have come under increased scrutiny of late around the legitimacy of their commercial partners. Manchester City, Birmingham and Norwich are among the clubs to have abandoned deals or seen them collapse.