fundinves.com is a scam: the fake DeFi prop firm that calls your money an insurance premium

Please note: we are a law firm that deals exclusively with online investment fraud and unauthorised financial activity. This article is based on a real case handled by the firm and is published in anonymised form in the public interest. If you recognise your own situation in what follows, you can submit your case using the form at the bottom of this page.

Usually a fraud has to be reconstructed. Not here: fundinves.com is a scam that put itself in writing. In the FAQ section of its own homepage, the platform trading as "Funding Invest" states in plain terms that the client's deposit is never used to execute trades or to invest on the markets, and that the deposit is not refundable because it constitutes an insurance premium. Translated into legal language: the money goes in, it is not invested, and it does not come back. It is written on the site, under a heading that reads "Frequently Asked Questions".

Why fundinves.com is a scam: the site's own FAQ is the evidence

Drafting a criminal complaint normally means spending weeks proving the artifice. In the fundinves file that was not necessary.

"The deposit is never used to trade": the artifice, self-declared

Asked whether the deposit is used to trade on the markets, fundinves answers no. The deposit, it says, serves exclusively as an insurance guarantee against capital "allocated" to the trader, and is therefore not subject to market exposure. A few lines further down, asked whether the client trades directly on the market, fundinves again answers no: the client does not buy or sell assets on an exchange as a retail investor would, but operates on "funded" accounts within the DeFi circuit, in what the site calls an "operational proof".

Hold on to that admission, because it is the entire case. If no client order ever reaches a market, then every number the client sees in the client area — positions, profits, balance — is not the representation of a real fact but its simulation. And the representation of a non-existent fact, capable of inducing error and of causing a disposition of assets, is precisely the artifice required by art. 640 of the Italian Criminal Code.

At the same time, and on the same page, fundinves displays testimonials from users thanking "the analysts" for guiding their entries and producing "consistent profits month after month". A platform which declares that it is not an intermediary, that it does not manage client funds and that it does not execute orders on the market, and which simultaneously publishes testimonials about analysts optimising clients' entries, contradicts itself within two scrolls. That is not editorial carelessness: it is the coexistence, in the same shop window, of the disclaimer written by the lawyer and the copy written by the sales team.

"The deposit is not refundable": the clause that proves intent from the outset

The second admission by fundinves is heavier still. The deposit, the site states, is not refundable, as it constitutes an insurance premium covering the proprietary capital entrusted to the trader, retained as a non-recoverable security measure for the duration of the trading activity.

As a matter of civil law such a clause is ineffective: it is unfair within the meaning of the consumer code and, in so far as it seeks to exclude at the root any restitution of sums paid under a relationship lacking lawful cause, it collides with art. 1418 of the Civil Code. But the interesting point is not the civil one. A clause cannot legitimise deception, and its presence in a contract does not make lawful what is not.

The point, in the fundinves case, is evidential. A structure which, at the moment of collection, has already written in black and white that the money will not be returned is not mismanaging an investment: it is documenting, in the very architecture of the relationship, that restitution was never contemplated. That is among the strongest indicators of intent from the outset — the awareness and will not to perform from the moment the contract is concluded — which case law requires in order to distinguish contractual fraud from mere breach.

Calling itself a "prop firm" does not take fundinves outside the statutory reservation

The defence is already laid out on the page: fundinves declares that it is not a broker and does not operate as a financial intermediary, describing itself as a "prop firm" operating within the DeFi ecosystem.

The argument does not hold, and it is worth explaining why, because this is the pattern we will meet more and more often.

Whether an activity falls within a statutory reservation does not depend on the name the operator gives it. It depends on the substance of the economic operation: collecting money from the public against the prospect of a return, with management of the money entrusted to a third party and an expectation of profit on the part of the payer. Where those elements are present, the operation falls within the reservation, and the reservation is protected by criminal law under art. 166 of the Consolidated Law on Finance (TUF) for investment services and activities, and under art. 130 of the Consolidated Banking Act (TUB) for taking deposits from the public. For crypto-asset services the framework is completed by Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 (MiCA) and, domestically, by legislative decree 129/2024.

That fundinves calls itself a "prop firm" is, if anything, counterproductive for whoever wrote it. A genuine proprietary trading firm trades its own capital and does not ask the trader for a non-recoverable payment described as an insurance premium. The model set out in the FAQ — a client payment, no market execution, non-refundability, "profits" credited at the platform's discretion — is not a prop firm: it is the collection of money against a simulation.

It should be added that promotional statements capable of distorting the consumer's economic decisions are also relevant as misleading commercial practices under the consumer code, within the competence of the Italian competition authority. That parallel administrative track is often overlooked and sometimes delivers faster results than the criminal one.

Technical checks on the fundinves.com domain

The registry and network checks on fundinves tell a precise story.

A 2023 domain, reconfigured on 18 September 2026

An RDAP query to the .com registry returns for fundinves.com a registration date of 6 August 2023 and an expiry date of 6 August 2027, with nameservers at a large US registrar and standard registrar-side lock statuses.

A domain registered in 2023 conveys an impression of solidity: it was not created yesterday. But the figure that matters is elsewhere in the same record: the last change dates from 18 September 2026, a few weeks before the victim made the payments, in October 2026.

The historical data completes the picture. Web archives hold snapshots of fundinves.com going back to 2011, and for much of 2026 the site was structured as a WordPress installation with team pages generated by a commercial theme. The addresses of those pages are still readable in the archives and deserve quoting, because they are eloquent: alongside profiles with Anglo-Saxon names there are entries duplicated mechanically, carrying the suffixes "-copy" and "-copy-copy". The "team" displayed by the site was not a group of professionals: it was the theme's placeholder content, duplicated from itself and never replaced.

The conclusion is that fundinves.com is not the long-standing domain of an investment company but a recovered domain reconfigured shortly before the campaign. Anyone checking domain age as an indicator of reliability is measuring the wrong thing: the date that matters is not the registration date but the date of the last reconfiguration. We examined the mirror image of this dynamic in dam.w24platform.com, where the domain was erased altogether.

No mail server, origin hidden behind a reverse proxy

Two network findings complete the technical picture on fundinves.

First: DNS queries on fundinves.com return no MX record at all. The domain cannot receive email. A platform claiming more than a million users across a hundred and ninety countries has no mailbox at its own domain name. Every communication therefore travels over channels that leave no trace attributable to the platform.

Second: the A records for fundinves.com point to the addresses of a large US reverse-proxy and CDN service. That technology is entirely legitimate and extremely common, but its effect here is to shield the origin server's IP address. Identifying the real hosting requires an order from the judicial authority addressed to the provider.

This last element is not a technical detail: it is the factual basis of the aggravating circumstance discussed below, because it describes precisely the use of telematic means capable of hindering identification.

The awards, the numbers and the testimonials: everything that cannot be verified

The fundinves homepage is built on a credibility apparatus that survives no scrutiny.

The site attributes awards to itself, including one in the name of a well-known US business publication and two others in the name of generically named bodies, one of which carries a syntactically malformed title. We found no trace of any of them. Claiming an award in the name of a real publication is, evidentially, among the most useful elements for the victim: it is a specific assertion, easily disproved, and its falsity can be established without expert evidence.

Then come the numbers: over a million users, more than a hundred and ninety countries, five years of operation, an eight-hundred-bitcoin protection fund, a place among the global top ten. None of it is verifiable, and the "protection fund" is declared without the on-chain address that would allow anyone to check it in thirty seconds — which, on a platform proclaiming itself decentralised and claiming "proof of reserves", is a contradiction in terms.

There is also an internal inconsistency that would suffice on its own: in its products section fundinves states maximum leverage of two hundred times on perpetual contracts; in the FAQ, a few hundred pixels lower, it states maximum leverage of five hundred times, tying it to the insurance cover on the deposit. Two incompatible figures on the same page, each presented as a structural feature of the service.

Finally the events calendar, which lists international appointments all falling in 2025 and none in 2026. A platform describing itself as a global leader stopped updating its public presence a year ago.

The mechanics: from the free webinar to the contract

The route that led the victim to fundinves.com is the increasingly common one of financial education used as an acquisition funnel.

The first contact with the fundinves network is not an investment offer: it is a free webinar. The format is effective because it reverses the psychological position — the participant does not perceive themselves as the target of a sale but as a student — and because it allows the organisers to select, among participants, those who show financial capacity. Only later does the platform appear, then a contract, then payment instructions.

The existence of a signed contract cuts both ways in these files. For the structure it is the instrument by which the matter is pushed onto the civil plane of breach. For the victim, read properly, it is the document that proves the promised performance was not deliverable and that the clauses were built to prevent restitution. The fundinves contract must therefore be obtained in full, schedules and general conditions included, and read alongside the site's FAQ: the deception is measured in the distance between the two texts.

The payments fell in October 2026, for a total exposure of around six thousand euros, and were made by bank transfers to Italian accounts. That apparently marginal detail changes the whole perspective of the case.

Domestic transfers: why this case has a real prospect of seizure

In most online fraud files the money leaves Italy at the first step, and reconstruction requires international cooperation instruments on timescales measured in months. Not here. The transfers made by the victim to the structure behind fundinves were executed to accounts held at Italian institutions.

Identifying the beneficiary, and the timescales

An Italian account used to collect payments to fundinves has an identifiable holder. The banking documentation can be obtained by the judicial authority using ordinary powers — a production order, acquisition and evidentiary seizure under arts. 248(2), 256 and 253 of the Code of Criminal Procedure — with no European Investigation Order and no letters rogatory. Where the request is well drafted and precise, the timescale is weeks.

From the beneficiary's account statement the next step can be reconstructed: where the six thousand euros went, whether to other Italian accounts, abroad, or to a crypto-asset exchange. Every link identified is a potential point of asset attack.

The instrument is preventive seizure under art. 321 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, with a view to confiscation, and, where the proceeds can no longer be traced in specie, value confiscation.

The account holder: almost always a money mule

It is only honest to say who will be found at the other end. In almost every case the holder of the Italian destination account is not the organiser of the fraud: it is a front recruited through a fake job offer, or a person who handed over their credentials, or themselves a victim.

That does not make the step useless — quite the opposite. Depending on the degree of awareness, the holder is liable for money laundering under art. 648-bis or self-laundering under art. 648-ter.1 of the Criminal Code, and above all is the first genuinely questionable person in the entire chain. From there one works back to whoever gave the instructions, to the contacts, to the devices.

Readers should also know the other side of this. Anyone who handed their own IBAN to fundinves — as the victim in this file did, having given the structure an email address, a telephone number and bank details — is exposed to exactly the same risk in reverse. If sums originating from other frauds were to pass through that account, even in-and-out, the position changes and the victim finds themselves under investigation. That is why these files must be set up before the bank reports, not after.

Still in contact with the fraudsters: the greatest risk and the greatest opportunity

In this case the victim was, at the time of instructing us, still in contact with the fundinves operators. That circumstance has to be handled with surgical precision, because it contains both the file's greatest danger and its greatest opportunity.

The danger is the second extraction. When the structure senses that the victim is still responsive, it activates the familiar sequence: unlocking fees, supposed taxes, compliance checks, margins to restore. Or, in the more insidious variant, it stages a third party offering to recover the sums — the so-called recovery room — which in international practice is run by the same organisation or by structures that buy its lists. There is also a risk that the victim will be invited to "receive" third-party funds into their account and forward them on: that is the request which turns a victim into a suspect.

The opportunity runs the other way. While the channel is open, the victim is in a position to document the conduct in real time: to preserve the messages, to obtain new payment instructions and therefore new bank details, to capture the client area before it is closed. No subsequent investigation will be able to reconstruct what can simply be saved at this stage.

There is one operational rule, and it must be followed: do not tell the other side that you have instructed a lawyer. The moment the structure behind fundinves learns that legal action is under way, it closes the channel, disables the client area and empties the collection accounts. Preserve, obtain, file. Do not warn.

Classification: art. 640 and the new paragraph 2-ter

The conduct attributable to fundinves constitutes fraud under art. 640 of the Criminal Code in its contractual form. The artifices are documented by the site itself: the simulation of non-existent trading, the display of unverifiable awards, unverifiable user numbers, testimonials describing a service the platform states elsewhere that it does not provide. Inducement into error is proved by the contract and the transfers. Unjust profit and loss are quantified by the payment records.

The mistake to avoid, common in complaints drafted without technical assistance, is invoking art. 640-ter — computer fraud. That provision requires alteration of the functioning of a computer system or unlawful intervention on data or programs. Here the computer system is the instrument of the false representation, not its object: the deception operates on the person, not on the machine.

As to aggravating circumstances, art. 640(2)(2-bis) incorporates the impaired-defence circumstance of art. 61 no. 5, which in telematic fraud is structural. But the decisive provision is paragraph 2-ter, introduced by law 90/2024, which aggravates fraud committed remotely through computer or telematic means capable of hindering the identification of the perpetrator or of others, with two to six years' imprisonment and a fine of EUR 700 to 3,000.

The fundinves facts fall in October 2026: no issue of non-retroactivity arises. And the capacity of the means to hinder identification does not need to be argued in the abstract, because it is documented: no corporate reference of any kind, no MX record, an origin server shielded by a reverse proxy, contact channels on unregistered numbers.

The systemic consequence matters. A statutory maximum of six years — this being an aggravating circumstance with special effect, counted under the criteria of art. 4 of the Code of Criminal Procedure — places the offence above the threshold in art. 266(1)(a), which requires offences punishable by more than five years. On simple fraud, telephone and electronic interceptions are not permitted; on aggravated fraud under art. 640(2-ter) they are. For files like fundinves that is the difference between a real investigation and shelving against unknown persons.

Unauthorised financial activity: the count nobody pleads

Alongside the fundinves fraud sits the provision systematically forgotten in complaints.

Art. 166 TUF punishes anyone providing investment services or activities without authorisation; art. 130 TUB protects the reservation on taking deposits; legislative decree 129/2024 covers the unauthorised provision of crypto-asset services in adaptation to MiCA. These are offences of danger: they are complete upon the mere unauthorised exercise of the reserved activity, regardless of any loss to the individual investor.

The procedural difference is substantial. Unauthorised financial activity is prosecuted ex officio and is subject to no complaint deadline. Pleading it gives the prosecutor an independent basis for prosecution, and shifts the subject of the inquiry from proving individual deception to the documentary, objective verification that no authorisation exists — which for fundinves is exhausted by consulting the supervisory registers. We developed this approach in our analysis of unauthorised financial activity and money entrusted to an acquaintance for a foreign broker.

Here the complaint deadline is open, and that changes everything

In files like fundinves the main problem is usually time already lost: art. 124 of the Criminal Code sets a three-month deadline from knowledge of the facts, and simple fraud is prosecuted on complaint, save where one of the aggravating circumstances in the subsequent paragraphs applies, or that of art. 61 no. 7.

In the fundinves case the payments date from October 2026 and awareness of the fraud matured between late October and early November. The deadline is fully open. Combined with the fact that the transfers were domestic and the channel with the counterparty was still live, this is one of the most favourable procedural positions we encounter.

Favourable does not mean easy. It means that the only real adversary here is the calendar: every week in which the collection accounts go unexamined is a week in which the sums are layered and put beyond reach.

Filing alone at the police station: why it can cost you the case

In the fundinves file the victim had planned to go and file a report personally. The instinct is understandable and, in itself, correct. But the way the report is made determines what the prosecutor's office will do over the following months.

A report taken down from an oral account typically produces a document describing an investment that went wrong on a foreign website, with no legal classification, no aggravating circumstances pleaded, no ordered exhibits, no destination accounts, no requests for investigative steps. On that basis registration is often against unknown persons for simple fraud, and the file takes the statistically predictable direction.

A technical filing does the opposite: it classifies the facts, pleads the circumstances under paragraph 2(2-bis) and paragraph 2-ter, adds unauthorised financial activity under art. 166 TUF, attaches in chronological order the payment records, the contract, screenshots of the fundinves FAQ and the domain registry findings, identifies the destination accounts and requests banking enquiries and seizure. The same material, two different fates.

One further note of caution: anyone who handed documents and bank details to the structure has a position to protect as well as a loss to report. If elements emerging during an interview point against them, art. 63 of the Code of Criminal Procedure requires the authority to stop the examination and invite them to appoint counsel, with the statements already made unusable; and if the person should have been heard as a suspect from the outset, their statements are wholly unusable. Attending with a lawyer is not excessive caution: it is how you avoid having to repair the damage afterwards.

What to secure, and in what order

The list is operational and must be carried out before anything else, because the fundinves site is still online and can disappear from one day to the next.

Full capture of the site's pages, in particular the FAQ, the awards section and the testimonials, preserving the date and time of capture. A registry attestation for the fundinves.com domain, with registration date, last-change date and nameservers. Documentation of the absence of MX records. The signed contract in full, with general conditions and schedules. Material relating to the webinar: recording, registration page, confirmation emails. All transfer records, with complete beneficiary details and destination IBAN. Native export of the conversations with the operators, not a printout. A list of the numbers and email addresses used by the counterparties, with contact dates. Screenshots of the client area showing balances and displayed trades.

On that basis a complaint is drafted pleading aggravated fraud under art. 640(2)(2-bis) and (2-ter) and unauthorised financial activity under art. 166 TUF, with an application for banking enquiries into the destination accounts and for seizure under arts. 253 and 321, and a request to be notified of any application to shelve the case under art. 408(2).

Readers who recognise their own case may also find useful our analyses of EliteClouds and the unlocking fees on a non-existent prize, cryptoledgerx.top and the blocked balance and HyperCommunity and the daily-return Ponzi scheme.

If you invested through fundinves.com: what to do now

The picture is this. fundinves.com is a scam with no authorisation of any kind, which admits in its own FAQ that it does not invest the money it receives and does not return it, which displays awards and figures with no supporting evidence, which contradicts itself on maximum leverage on the same page, and whose domain was reconfigured a few weeks before the collection campaign began.

There is no prospect of recovering the sums by dealing with the platform, or with anyone who offers to recover them. There is a technical route, and in this case it is more workable than usual, because the transfers were domestic and the destination accounts can be identified without international cooperation. But it depends entirely on speed.

Our firm has already handled this case. If you sent money to fundinves.com, if you attended the webinar and signed the contract, or if you are being asked for a further payment to unlock your balance, you can submit your position for a preliminary assessment.

If you have suffered the same fraud, we can help you. Fill in the form at the bottom of this page.