I looked up the Prosper Book on Amazon and noticed a link to the P2P lending site DUCK9. The author of the book, Roger Steciak, states in his blog on Amazon:

I was interviewed recently by the SocialLendingWatch.com blog and realized there are now seven sites in the United States offering or planning to offer for-profit people-to-people lending. Duck9, LendingClub, and Prosper are up and running now, while GlobeFunder, Loanio, Microplace, and Zopa have announced their intentions of launching at some point.

Since it mentions Zopa is due to launch, we know the post is out of date because Zopa launched several months ago.  However, I was surprised that I had never heard of Duck9 since it merited a mention from “The Prosper Book” author. I searched for reviews of DUCK9 but found little information. I browsed over to the site DUCK9.com. It seems like a small niche lending site for students, even smaller than Fynaz will be. The DUCK9 site also has some information on auto loans.

The name is odd but they give a reasonable explanation. DUCK stands for “Digital Underground Credit Knowledge” since a portion of the goal of the site is helping students with their credit score. The number nine is for the code used on credit reports for charge offs. Personally, I would like to avoid the number 9 being anywhere near my P2P lending portfolio, but they state the goal is to reduce the number of charge offs — 9s.

The page about how Duck9 works says that you can earn up to 9% on your loans guaranteed or around 12% not guaranteed. Nine percent guaranteed sounds fantastic with today’s interest rates until you read that they are not FDIC insured. Funds are DUCK9 insured. That guarantee is not worth much to me considering that I have never heard of the site.

They do offer some nice features to borrowers like sending reminders via SMS when bills are due to try to help the borrowers remember all bills and not just the DUCK9 loan.

I see several red flags on a web site asking me for money for peer lending:

• I already mentioned the unclear targeting — auto loans and students.
• The site has Google AdSense advertisements on a few of the pages. See this one. Information sites use AdSense for revenue, but I don’t think that a P2P lending site should be using AdSense to earn money. It looks cheap.
• The registration page is not encrypted. It uses HTTP rather than HTTPS.
• The site also sells an eBook on improving your FICO score — link.
• The cheesy home page and the inconsistent site layout look unprofessional.
• Incorrect punctuation and capitalization in the site copy.

If you want to take a risk on both the service and some students, you will have to wait. According to the lender registration page, there is a significant wait list to be a lender. Fire the marketing department! They can’t find students in need of money. How hard can that be? Quote from the page:

Become a Duck9 lender

This is open to US residents only. The maximum you can lend out is $10,000. You must have a valid social security number.

Duck9 might ask you for recent bank statements, credit card statements, mortgage statements, etc.

NOTE: there is a SIGNIFICANT waitlist to be a lender.
Money isn’t accepted while you’re on the waitlist

With all the other P2P lending options coming up in the near future, I’ll skip DUCK9.

Has anyone else heard of DUCK9 or have any information on it?