Cambist is now promoting the purchase of cell phone contracts and what it is advertising as “sales agreements”. Both are also offered with a guaranteed 19.5% return.
In both cases, the products are supposedly sold by the original issuers with the aim of generating immediate cash flow. The theory is that they will get a quick payout, while the new owners of the contracts will be paid the monthly fees and so make back their money with interest.
To understand how this supposedly works, imagine company A creates a cell phone contract package that it sells to consumer B at a monthly fee. If that fee is, for argument's sake R100 per month, the contract is effectively worth R2 400 over a period of two years.
However, company A might not want to wait 24 months to realise that income. So it uses the Cambist platform to sell on that contract to someone else, Cambist user C, at a discount – say R1 800 – to generate immediate cash flow. Cambist keeps some of the discount as commission, so Cambist user C actually pays R1 932. Over 24 months, he or she gets R2 400 back in total, which represents the 19.5% return Cambist is promising.
That is the theory. But when Moneyweb scrutinised where these contracts were coming from, we came up against some rather evasive answers.
On August 25 we asked the then manager of Cambist, Magda van der Merwe, who the companies were that were selling the cell phone contracts. Her reply was that there were “several owners of cellphone contracts, who are willing to sell the rights in terms thereof”.
However, when she was asked to name them, she admitted that there was actually only one, which she called “Spice Phone”. Moneyweb had already been in contact with this company, which is actually Spice Mobile. They claim to sell mobile contracts to blue collar workers.
Their business model is to package data and airtime from the mobile operators (MTN, Vodacom and Cell C) and to sell this together with devices as 24 month contracts. Their way of guaranteeing payment is that the monthly fee is paid directly from payroll.
However, there are two big problems here. The first is that Spice Mobile has refused to disclose the name of any company that it deals with. So the origins of these contracts could not be verified.
The second problem is that Spice Mobile confirmed that they had last sold contracts on the Cambist platform in May. That was nearly three months prior to Van der Merwe telling Moneyweb that they were the sole supplier of cell contracts on the Cambist platform.
However, Cambist was still selling cell contracts at the time and continued to do so. When Annemi Olivier, a representative of OneLaw, was asked about this on September 26, she claimed that “since last week we have added other companies that sell these contracts on the same principle”. However, she has yet to name who these suppliers are.
So we have a situation where Cambist claims to be selling cell contracts, but will not say where these contracts come from. They are also unable to explain how they were selling cell phone contracts for a three and a half month period when they did not have any suppliers.
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