The internet serves as an excellent tool for entrepreneurs and investors, allowing them to find funding or investment opportunities easily and cost-effectively. However, sadly the internet can also be used as a tool for fraudsters. Here are some tips on how to negotiate with the investors and avoid problems.

Top Tips

• Remember to perform due diligence on any investors you are thinking of dealing with. Although we do our best to vet the investors using the investor profile, phone calls and any feedback we receive from the entrepreneurs, we have over 374799 investors and can't know them all personally.
• Be very careful if someone contacts you directly and doesn't appear in your list of interested investors. If this happens you should ask the investor to issue a contact request through our website to confirm they're registered with us.
• Be suspicious of anyone who pressures you to make a quick decision. Legitimate investors will respect your decision and take the time to answer all your questions. Don't trust people who take the "threatening" (if you don't make up your mind now, you'll miss your chance) approach. Genuine investors will never be over-enthusiastic or aggressively try to strong-arm you into signing up.
• Don't be afraid to ask the investors questions about their background and previous investments. They should be keen to impress you and willing to answer any questions you might have.
• Most importantly you should be very careful when giving the investors any money regardless of what they claim it is for (e.g. lawyer's fees, deposits, insurance, etc.). If you send an "investor" money by bank transfer or Western Union, you'll probably never hear from them again. You should certainly never hand over cash as this probably involves money laundering. If any of our investors ask for upfront fees of any kind, please let us know as soon as possible.
• Be careful about revealing bank account details and personal security information.
• You can save time and money by trying to do as much negotiating as possible via phone and email before you travel to meet the investor. For example, there's no point taking a flight to show the investor a business plan, when you could send it to him via email or in the post.

The best weapon against problems is vigilance and common sense. If you are at all suspicious of any of the investors you can use the 'Report' button on the investor's profile, so that we can look into it.