Greetings fellow adults. Tino here.
EasyEquities; it's an investment platform
that was founded in 2014
in South Africa and um well it allows
you to buy and sell shares, equity
,stocks and all that kind of stuff.
Now, EasyEquities made investing in
stocks and shares
pretty cool, like, they made it easy for
uh young people
and people who are not that financially
savvy
to get into investing because they make
it really easy to just buy and sell
shares. Oh and they also allow you to buy
and sell shares not only on the South
African stock market but also the
American stock market which,
well, there's some massive companies there
I'm sure you can understand the
advantages
Now recently they tried to
release a product called
Securities Lending,
What is the Securities Lending you might ask?
Well, I didn't know until a twitter user
called
@Banker__X or something
broke it down for me and I'm sure
many of their users also had no idea
what this feature is.
In simple terms, you're basically
allowing easy equities
to borrow your shares, you know the
shares that you own
under your account, they borrow that
stock and then
use it for trading or whatever and the
money they make from that
they will share that with you. So you
basically make some profits from that.
Sounds pretty straightforward right?
Using their own words
"you make money without even lifting a finger"
I've heard that phrase before; Now, fellow
adults let me tell you something.
There is no such thing as easy money.
Whenever you hear somebody
saying "easy money", be very skeptical. Okay.
I'm sure you've heard these platforms
like i think it's Crowd1
uh mmm all these platforms they claim to
make you easy money you know
Great returns within a month or
whatever,
Always be skeptical so that phrase alone
is a bit sketchy
So you might be thinking,
you know, fine if it's not easy money
then where's the risk?
Well, i'm glad you asked. 
Here's what they say in their fine print
You know, down in the Terms and
Conditions; the things nobody ever reads!
"We will not be liable for any losses,
damages, cost, fees, charges or liabilities
YOU may incur, including any tax
consequences
as a result of any Securities Lending
Transactions you may enter
with us."
Basically if they screw up, you pay for it!
At this point you might be thinking, "Hey
fam, what's wrong with this? Okay they're
You know, they're releasing a new product
and they're giving you the Terms and
Conditions of using that product.
Surely there's nothing wrong with that?
You are kind of right actually, but,
here's where things get interesting.
You have to opt out of this product.
You have already agreed!
Now, how do they justify this?
Well once again,
I'm glad you asked. Here's what
the CEO, i think he's the CEO;
Here's what he says about that.
... the, you know, the communication
um didn't give the customer the choice
uh it felt to them. I mean, we thought it
was the "default choice" because
who doesn't want to earn extra income
and so we made the default option
"opt-in" and you know we got whipped up.
Okay, okay. Think of it this way righ. um
You go to a car dealership and then you
buy a car from that dealership, right.
It's yours, you you sign the contract
whatever you do you buy a car and then
it's yours it's yours right
Two years down the line, car dealership
dude comes over to your place
and just grabs your car he starts using
it to Uber and
the way he justifies it is "Well, I mean I
can make some money off it
and i will make some money together i
thought you would automatically agree to that
okay maybe a bad analogy but that's
pretty much what these guys are doing.
Anyways here's where things really
went downhill
So that Twitter user i mentioned earlier
@Banker__X, he actually
broke this whole thing down and this is
how i founded about it. He summarized it
really well so i'm gonna share a link to
that tweet uh to that thread
in the description. That dude basically
read the T & Cs so that you don't have to.
So obviously when he broke it down
people are outraged
"whoa what's going on here" and like you
know people sometimes are like super
polite to actually try to understand
what's going on. Here you've got a lady
um basically she was asking "hey guys can
you please explain what's going on here"
and then they respond you know
"you can earn extra money blah blah" and this other girls says
i still don't get it can you break it
down in layman's terms
And then they're like "you make money
without even lifting a finger" 
That's still not saying much, obviously honestly
that really doesn't say much.
And then this response "when we give an
explanation you seem to not understand,
what's wrong with you? Please read the
FAQs and
tune in to the webinar next week
Thursday.
Why would you think that was a good idea?
you know whoever was doing support was
probably just chilling there
frustrated out of his mind and
was just like
"man these dumb people why don't you just get it"
Not only were they so rude when
they were
responding to their users uh they were
also giving conflicting information for
example
you know the ceo was saying you get like
48 or something
and then another person in their company
was like now you get 40 like
it was all over the place and then they
say no one is being forced to do
anything
you can opt out if you want in the email
that they
apparently sent out when they were
introducing this feature they included a
clause from their tnc's which says
if for some reason there's something in
there that doesn't gel with you
please submit your notice and will
basically close your account within 10
days
so they sent this in the same email
they're introducing this product so
obviously people were confused and
they were frustrated that people were
confused that doesn't make any sense
why i think they tweeted this like a
thousand times
if you do not agree with our terms and
conditions as a whole
then unfortunately you cannot use our
platform and i love the way people are
responding on
obviously twitter south africa twitter
with memes i hope they at least get some
training this is
not how you do customer service now they
pulled this launch
they're not going to do it anymore but
not for long they just want to iron out
some issues and then
they're probably going to like relaunch
it in a couple of weeks hopefully it
will be an
opt-in option because to be honest i
checked my emails i didn't see any of
these emails that
apparently introduced this product so i
was going to be one of those people who
was going to be opted into something i
had
no idea about and if for some reason
they ended up being
you know reckless about when it comes to
you know doing their thing
i was going to pay for it and i mean
it's not the first time people in south
africa have been
you know scooped up when it comes to
like money issues remember vbs bank
you know the the proud vendor bank
robbed people of billions
and well yeah people don't want to
repeat about it let's hope they can
recover from this i'm sure they will
there were no news just reports about
this this only actually only went
big on twitter it wasn't even that big
so
they'll be fine in a couple of days let
me know in the comments if you witness
this nonsense unfolding and if you
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Okay, you have a good day!
