T

he Financial Services Authority (OJK) has warned that a new investment scheme called '€œMMM'€, now gaining popularity in the country, may involve a financial scam.

The commissioner for consumer education and protection at the OJK, Kusumaningtuti S. Soetiono, said on Thursday in Jakarta that the OJK'€™s call center had received 235 calls from various regions and international locations asking for information about the investment scheme.

'€œThe inquiries and information collected by the OJK show that promotions of the scheme have been increasing lately. According to our findings, many people were asked to join the investment scheme through different but identical products with different names through various means of communication, such as BlackBerry Messenger [BBM] and WhatsApp,'€ Kusumaningtuti said at a press conference Thursday.

Kusumaningtuti said the 235 incoming callers had been anxious about the investment scheme'€™s activities. They asked various detailed questions about the scheme; some asked about its operating permits and the location of its head office as well as the investment yield offer, which was a suspicious 30 percent a month, said Kusumaningtuti.

The OJK has been investigating the investment scheme, called Mavrodi Mondial Moneybox or Manusia Membantu Manusia (MMM), for the past few months, with assistance from the Task Force for Investment Alert, following hundreds of inquiries from various groups of people.

According to Kusumaningtuti, the MMM was identical to a number of '€œmoney games'€ that resemble the Ponzi Scheme, which was basically a fraudulent investment operation where the operator '€” an individual or organization '€” paid returns to its investors from new capital it collected from other new investors, rather than from the profit it earned.

Based on their investigation, the OJK and the task force found that the MMM scheme did not have any operating permit and was unclear about its board of management and actual address, as well as the mechanism by which funds were managed.

However, Kusumaningtuti said the OJK had yet to receive any complaints of loss or actual cases of fraud from incoming callers. To warn future investors, the OJK plans to hold road shows in various regions to increase awareness of the possibility that MMM might be a scam.

Luthfi Zain Fuady, head of the Task Force for Investment Alert, said his team had yet to receive reports from the National Police'€™s Criminal Investigations Directorate (Bareskrim) regarding the MMM scheme, even though it expected that the warning from the OJK would reduce the chance of fraud occurring.

The task force, which was established by the OJK, acts as a coordination forum comprising the OJK itself and eight other institutions, such as Bareskrim and the Trade Ministry and Investment Coordinating Board (BKPM), to combat fraudulent investments as part of the OJK'€™s program on consumer education and protection.

Aside of receiving phone calls, Kusumaningtuti said the OJK had also found that the MMM investment scheme was advertised several times on national television as well as social media, such as Facebook, and its own website, www.mmmindo.net.

'€œWe have asked the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission [KPI] to help our investigation because the investment scheme has been advertised several times on national TV,'€ Kusumaningtuti said.

Rusli Nasution, the OJK'€™s head of investigations for the financial services sector, said the regulator had found several names on the MMM'€™s website and Facebook page and invited them on April 7 for questioning at the financial regulator'€™s headquarters regarding their business. However, as of now, the invited people have still failed to show up.

'€œTheir domiciles are in Bekasi and Bogor, West Java, as well as Tangerang, Banten. They said they could not come to the OJK because they were busy,'€ Rusli said.