It's an *obvious* scam. If for no other reason, because there is absolutely no way to verify if a claimed loss is due to any actual investment loss or not. That one factor alone is enough to label an investment a scam.

There is no legitimate investment where you go to the guy you invested with and he can say, "Oh, I'm sorry, your investment lost money", and that's all he tells you. In *every* legitimate investment, when a loss it taken, the investor has some kind of explanation of how the loss was incurred, evidence that the funds were actually invested in something that had a legitimate expectation of earning a profit, and so on.