Anyone who is on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook or TikTok often comes across offers that sound tempting: from weight loss powder to lucrative investments. In our series, reporter Judith Henke takes a look at these products. What is behind it, how serious are you?

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A young, blond man films himself in a park, he looks a bit depressed. There was a critical press article about him and his company, he says. Now he wants to comment on that.

What follows is a minute-long, remorseful monologue. He speaks of having “probably” exaggerated returns, a statement about the supervision of the company by BaFin was “expressed in a misleading manner” and the marketing was “perhaps too exaggerated”. Now he vows to get better.

But what happened? Why did this friendly, harmless-looking young man have to stand in front of the selfie camera so remorsefully? Let’s put it this way: I wasn’t completely innocent.

Because three weeks ago I published an article in which I dealt with Michael Jakob – the man in the video – and his company AlleAktien. The start-up writes detailed stock analyzes and uploads them to its website. Those who pay 29 euros per month can read the analyses.

Not a bad idea – but when it came to marketing, AlleAktien wasn’t too particular about the truth. The article went viral – and within the next few days I received a number of letters from disappointed customers telling me about their experiences with AlleAktien.

New subscribers who remain paying customers for a certain period of time were promised a free share and a printed analysis.

But this advertising promise was not kept or was only kept after repeated inquiries. In addition, many former customers complain that they continue to receive a newsletter that they have long since canceled, often several times.

One reader even wrote to me that AlleAktien continued to withdraw money from his account for a few months after he had given notice long ago.

Two other previous customers tell me how their access to premium content was cut right after they canceled their subscription. But until the end of the notice period, they would actually have been entitled to the premium content.

Doesn’t sound very customer-friendly – but does AlleAktien founder Michael Jakob even know about these complaints? I kindly inform him and send him a detailed questionnaire by email. Unlike my last research, he even answers me.

He admits that there was an “organizational misunderstanding” during the last campaign with freebies for new customers – that has now been resolved. But gift campaigns in the past “worked very well”.

You can subscribe and unsubscribe from the e-mail newsletters with one click, and the company “observes very strictly the legal requirements” here. The cases in which money was withdrawn from a customer after termination and access was cut off too early are “technical errors” that have been remedied in the interests of the customer.

So it doesn’t seem like there was any bad intention. Such luck – because some of what the disappointed customers describe would otherwise be legally relevant.

This is how Niels Nauhauser from the Baden-Württemberg consumer advice center explains to me: “If the customer is on 06.30. has terminated and also until 30.06. has paid, his access may not be cut off prematurely.”

Continuing to send a newsletter even though the consumer has explicitly unsubscribed is in conflict with the law. Likewise, it is anti-competitive to advertise products with the announcement of an extra – such as the free share – if these announcements are not followed.

But whether on purpose or by mistake, announcing something you can’t deliver on will damage customer trust. And in the case of AlleAktien, some readers who contacted me seem to no longer believe any of the claims.

The company’s website says: “We donate 1 euro to the children’s cancer charity for every premium membership.” My readers asked me if that was true. So I asked the German Cancer Aid, to which the Children’s Cancer Aid belongs. The answer of a spokeswoman: There is no fundraiser registered and they have not received any donations yet.

But would AlleAktien really go that far? I’ll also ask Michael Jakob. Yes, they haven’t made a donation yet, he says. But there is a reason for that: “We started the campaign on May 1st, 2021 and want to transfer money once every 12 months.”

They are currently processing the donation. Afterwards, I would be happy to look at the donation receipt, he writes and then adds: “We know that we are not perfect.” My article helped them “discover many improvements in communication and organizational structure”.

That seems open to criticism. However, AlleAktien took harsher action against other critics. A few days ago, a photo published by the financial influencer tech shares went online. It showed an excerpt of a warning against him, which WELT also has in full.

In it, AlleAktien declares that it is entitled to damages of almost two million euros. One of the reasons: As a result of the “damaging” and “inflammatory” posts written by tech shares on its social media channels, more than 1,500 customers have terminated their current contracts.

But does a single financial influencer — even if they have more than 128,000 Instagram followers — really have the power to get 1,500 people to unsubscribe?

Or is it something else? Was it because AlleAktien sometimes only listed one option under “Reason for cancellation” when a customer wants to cancel their subscription: “@techaktien persuaded me to cancel”?

The founder Michael Jakob does not comment directly on the question of why AlleAktien decided on this approach. But he writes that the financial blogger did not want an amicable solution in advance. A “comparative agreement” in the conflict is now imminent.

Disappointed customers, legal disputes – but what about the quality of the AlleAktien product itself? I didn’t examine them in my first article – and I’ll make up for that here. Since AlleAktien founder Michael Jakob has repeatedly expressed optimism about the share of the Chinese tech giant Alibaba, I first look at a 51-page China analysis that he wrote himself.

In a table on the second page of the report, I can read that China’s gross domestic product grew by 5.8 percent in 2020. That surprises me: according to figures from the World Bank, China’s GDP only grew by 2.3 percent in 2020?

But much more amazing is what he writes about the political situation in China. For example: “Internet and censorship exist to protect the state.” It’s the same in Germany. “National Socialist and generally ‘anti-democratic or anti-party’ content is also prohibited in Germany and will be severely punished.” In addition, “in contrast to Germany and America, nobody in China has a problem with surveillance.”

When I ask Michael Jakob how he came to these unusual conclusions in his China report, he replies: “In the relevant passage I describe China from a Chinese point of view.” He travels a lot in the region and has worked with companies and people exchanged on site.

Incidentally, in addition to AlleAktien, Michael Jakob has launched another product that is intended to help investors with their investment decisions: a data platform called Eulerpool.

As always modest, the founder has advertised the new tool on Instagram in the past: Eulerpool is supposed to make the expensive Bloomberg terminal, which professional investors would use for around 2,200 euros a month, “affordable for everyone”.

So let’s take a look at what this second Bloomberg terminal can do. I’m looking for high-yield stocks and I type tobacco company Imperial Brands into the search bar.

At first glance: Lots of numbers and graphics that will certainly help me decide whether an investment in the British tobacco giant is worthwhile. First, I take a closer look at the company’s sales development – ​​because is smoking still a trend like it used to be? At least in my environment, more and more people are stopping it.

The figures on Eulerpool seem to support my anecdotal evidence: Up to 2020, sales will still be in the tens of billions – but then it will collapse dramatically from one year to the next. Has the Corona pandemic converted humanity to a healthier lifestyle and am I the first to notice this?

I nearly cant believe that. So I take a closer look at the sales chart. Strange: Even though we are in June 2022, Eulerpool is still estimating sales for 2021. Does the data tool that Bloomberg aims to “make affordable for everyone” lack up-to-date data?

I go to the Imperial Brands website and I have no problem finding the 2021 annual report with the current figures.

This includes sales, which for 2021 will be almost £33 billion instead of the £9 billion estimated by Eulerpool. So my Corona non-smoking thesis will probably not work after all.

Is this an isolated case or a general problem? Probably the latter. At the largest crypto broker Coinbase, the key figures are even completely missing.

On the other hand, Eulerpool shines with a company that no longer exists. For example, Australian oil and gas company Woodside Petroleum changed its name to Woodside Energy Group on May 25 and changed its International Securities Identification Number (ISIN) in the process. Not a trace of this at Eulerpool.

When asked about some of the errors, founder Michael Jakob replies that the Eulerpool website is still under construction and that there may still be isolated errors.

However, due to the accumulation of errors, the question arises as to where Eulerpool gets its data from. On other platforms, I can find references to the data suppliers from which the data is purchased.

This is certainly not cheap – because the regular data collection for the many companies is a lot of work, for which the established providers such as Bloomberg or FactSet are well paid.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the German BaFin are mentioned in several places at Eulerpool. But they don’t offer many data points at all and the rest only for a limited number of shares.

I can hardly imagine that the young start-up Eulerpool would cover the rest of the recording effort for, according to its own statements, 15,000 analyzed shares on its own.

So I go looking for clues. In the past, AlleAktien had also offered a data platform with “AlleAktien Quantitative”, which was free at the time. Initially, “AlleAktien Quantitative” relied on the data provider FactSet.

A FactSet employee also confirms that there was a business relationship in the past. But he doesn’t want to tell me why it ended.

AlleAktien founder Michael Jakob also does not want to comment on this when asked. “We ask for your understanding that we cannot provide any information on this, since we generally do not take a position as to who we have or do not have business relationships with,” he writes.

He uses the same sentence several times in his statement. Because he also does not want to comment on the question of whether and from which provider Eulerpool obtains its data. And so the origin of the large amount of data, including the errors it contains, remains a well-kept secret.