A hearing was held in the Celsius bankruptcy proceedings on November 1 at 11 am ET.
It went on for three hours. I sat threw all of it and drafted a story. David Gerard polished the draft and added more comments and analysis. You can read the full post on David’s blog. [David Gerard]
Here’s what we covered:
Secret Celsius employees will not get bonuses.
The examiner expands her work plan to include the CEL token and how Celsius marketed its services — send us your coins! We’re your friend, banks are you enemies! HODL!
The P-word came up multiple times in the hearing.
Celsius can’t sell its $23 million in stablecoins until it’s clear who owns them.
The examiner report is a ticking time bomb set to blow up the best made plans.
Please take a moment to subscribe to our Patreon accounts. We need your support, even if it’s just a few dollars a month. Links are in the blog post!
I nearly ventured to Austin Wednesday, but my flight was canceled due to the storm, havoc, and general disaster in the area. I found another flight later in the day and was headed out the door, when I thought, nah. Turned out to be a good decision, since I probably wouldn’t have survived more than a day without wifi.
The power's out and supermarkets are empty. But thank god for #bitcoin, right?
Last week, Tether issued another 2.2 billion tethers, so you can buy bitcoin with real cash at a higher price. As of today, Feb. 21, there are now $34 billion worth of tethers in circulation—all backed by Tether’s good word. Oh, and they just printed another 800 million this morning.
Bitcoin is over $57,000. Why? Because it is a Ponzi scheme, and people who put their money into a Ponzi or MLM scheme get excited when numbers go up because they think they are getting hilariously rich. When bitcoin reached $1 trillion market cap earlier this week, it was an occasion for celebration in the bitcoin world. All of the bitcoiners on Twitter gave themselves laser eyes—in the hopes of pushing bitcoin to $100,000—and posted pictures of raw, juicy steaks.
Market cap, as I have explained, is a delusional number when it comes to crypto. A trillion-dollar market cap assumes everyone who owns bitcoin bought it for $55,000 and could sell it for that. That is nowhere near the truth. Many bitcoiners bought bitcoin for a fraction of what it is today. And if everyone sold at once, the market would collapse. It’s all fantasy.
My weekly reminder that I have a Patreon account. Thank you to my new patrons, who pushed me up over $600 last week. You can subscribe for as little as $5 a month. It’s like buying me a beer or a latte every four weeks.
Okay, let’s talk about bitcoin’s newest crazy god, who also has laser eyes on his Twitter profile.
MicroStrategy: More cowbell
Every single day, MicroStrategy chief Michael Saylor is on Twitter—or elsewhere—shilling bitcoin. This has literally been his new day job since he staked the future of his entire company and his reputation on “number go up.” His tweets are bizarre and often make no sense. Lately, he has been taking random quotes from famous people and attributing them to bitcoin.
“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” ~ Nikola Tesla on #Bitcoin
In his latest move, Saylor has taken MicroStrategy deeper down the debt hole. Last week, the company sold $1.05 billion in convertible senior notes, which it plans to invest in more bitcoin. The notes mature in February 2027. (Decrypt,MicroStrategy PR)
This is on top of the firm’s $650 million bond offering in December, which MicroStrategy also used to buy bitcoin. Those notes mature in December 2025. The company owns 72,000 bitcoin per a February regulatory filing. And don’t forget, Saylor has his own personal stash of bitcoin, though we don’t know how much he still has—or if he was selling when MicroStrategy was buying.
If the price of bitcoin collapses, MicroStrategy could literally go bankrupt. But remember, Saylor owns 70% of the company’s voting stock, so he calls the shots. The other MicroStrategy board members can only sit back and watch in horror.
Big companies buying bitcoin and putting them into cold storage means more bitcoin getting pulled out of circulation so that the already small supply of circulating bitcoin grows smaller and the market becomes easier for whales to manipulate—even if those whales bought their hoards of BTC via alias accounts funded with tethers.
So what if MicroStrategy puts another $1 billion into bitcoin and Tesla buys $1.5 billion worth? Tether issues that much fake money in a week. Meanwhile, all the real cash in bitcoin goes out the door as miners sell their 900 newly-minted bitcoin per day for fiat. Bitcoin itself generates no revenue. It’s simply investor money going in one end and out the other.
Jorge Stolfi, a Brazilian computer scientist, estimates that the accumulative amount that bitcoin investors have lost so far is at least $15 billion. When you invest in bitcoin, you immediately lose money, just like all those who invested in Bernie Madoff’s fund, though they went on for years thinking they were making money.
And I am not even considering Tether. As a whole, bitcoin investors are now losing at least 45 million USD/day just to the miners. The Tether Triad probably takes even more than that. Cumulatively, it is ~15 billion USD to the miners, maybe up to 20 billion USD for Tether.
We should be hearing something soon on the New York attorney general’s investigation into Bitfinex/Tether, but probably nothing big, or earth moving—not yet at least.
Bitfinex’s law firm Steptoe filed a letter on Jan. 19, saying Bitfinex/Tether needed more time to send in their documents. Here is what they said exactly: “We will plan to next contact the Court in approximately 30 days to either provide a final status update or to schedule a conference with the Court to discuss any open items.”
The office of the attorney general still has to take a position on the material it receives, and Bitfinex boasted that it had spammed them with some 2.5 million documents. My guess is that Bitfinex, like failed Canadian crypto exchange QuadrigaCX, hasn’t kept accurate records of their financial dealings and they are flying by the seat of their pants. Quadriga operator Gerald Cotten kept no books, commingled funds, and viewed customer money as his personal slush fund.
Tether doomsday scenario
Some people—Nouriel Roubini in particular—have predicted that Tether will get taken down this year, though it will take a much larger effort than the NY AG alone. Still, what will happen if Tether’s operators are arrested and its bank accounts seized? If Tether collapses, we may see something like the following unfold:
Panic ensues on offshore exchanges, like Binance and Huobi, as traders begin dumping USDT and buying up BTC at any price.
The price of BTC on banked vs. unbanked exchanges begins to diverge. BTC goes up on unbanked exchanges and drops on banked exchanges, like Coinbase, as people start selling their BTC for cash en masse.
Banked exchanges face liquidity crises as they can’t keep up with withdrawals. We start to see system outages and paused trading—similar to what happened with Robinhood on Jan. 28.
The price of BTC collapses to the point where bitcoin miners cannot pay their monstrous power bills.
At some point, the bitcoin hash rate will drop, and bitcoin will go into a death spiral. When miners can’t pay their electric bills, they unplug from the network. This leaves bitcoin vulnerable to attacks, and the virtual currency becomes worthless.
Mind you, bitcoin will never die off completely. Unlike other Ponzi schemes, which disappear when they collapse, bitcoin will spring back to life from time to time. This is the fourth—and by far the biggest—bitcoin bubble since 2009.
Bitcoin’s sick energy consumption
After Tesla announced it bought 1.5 billion worth of BTC, bitcoin’s grotesque energy consumption has come under fire. Based on some estimates, the network consumes as much energy as the entire country of Argentina with 45 million people. Christmas lights are literally a more productive use of electricity to bring joy to people’s lives than bitcoin. (This is a joke. In 2018, bitcoiners claimed that Christmas lights consumed more energy than bitcoin.)
Bitcoiners like to argue this is all green energy, but that is simply not true. Two-thirds of bitcoin mining is based in China, a country that relies heavily on coal-fired electricity. Some miners in the Sichuan province get power from hydro, but only during the wet season. The rest of the time, they turn to fossil fuels. (My blog)
The Three Gorges Dam—a gargantuan structure straddling the Yangtze River in China’s Hubei province—has long been criticized for its environmental impact and displacement of two million people. The dam generated a record 112 terawatt hours of electricity in 2020. According to Digiconomist, bitcoin consumes 79 TWh of electricity per year—more than half that.
You need one million Bitmain’s Antminer 19s Pros to reach the current bitcoin hashrate of 110M TH/s. That means there are at least one million nodes on the bitcoin network—more if miners are using Bitmain’s outdated S17 model. These machines are good for two years max before they get tossed into landfills and replaced with more efficient ASIC rigs.
Bitcoin processes 300,000 transactions per day. The all-in cost of a single bitcoin transaction is $20 for infrastructure and $40 for electricity. Miners currently break even when the BTC price is $20,000. (That’s based on energy and other costs.)
Coinbase behind Tesla’s BTC purchase
Coinbase facilitated Tesla’s recent $1.5 billion purchase of bitcoin, according to The Block. An unidentified source told the outlet that the San Francisco-based crypto exchange made the purchase on behalf of Tesla over the course of several days in early February. The price of BTC in the first week of Feb. was around $38,000.
Similar to how it helped MicroStrategy make its big BTC purchase, Coinbase broke up Tesla’s order into small pieces and routed those to over-the-counter trading desks to minimize the impact on the overall bitcoin market.**
Coinbase wrote up a case study on how it bought bitcoin for MicroStrategy.
Motley Fool’s ship of fools
Another ship of fools has headed off to sea.
The Motley Fool is a private financial and investing advice company based in Alexandria, Virginia. It’s been around since 1993, so you would think they actually do their due diligence. Apparently not. Also, regular folks rely on them for sage investment advice, which is why I was shocked to learn Motley Fool was putting $5 million into bitcoin. (Fool announcement)
Motley Fool justified the investment with these three reasons:
We believe it will store value more effectively than gold over the long term.
We believe it may become a medium for transactions, as/if pricing stabilizes in the decade ahead.
We believe it can act as a productive hedge against inflation.
We’ve got BIG NEWS! We’re buying $5 million in Bitcoin on our own balance sheet.
All three reasons are blitheringly stupid. Medium for transactions? If the price stabilizes in the future? Name one time in the past decade where the price of bitcoin has stabilized. As I explained earlier, the more people who hodl bitcoin, the less stable it becomes. It will never be a stable asset. And you can’t call bitcoin a “store of value” if you get only 20% of what you paid for it.
I spent two hours on Thursday watching the first half of a five-hour GameStop House Financial Services Committee hearing. Most of the questions were not that interesting. This is the first of three hearings. I’m not sure I can watch anymore, unless someone from the SEC, such as Gary Gensler, joins in on the questioning.
The nut is that Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev apologized to his users for stopping customer trading during the peak of the madness, but says he wasn’t colluding with hedge funds. “We don’t answer to hedge funds,” he said. “We serve the millions of small investors who use our platform every day to invest.” (NPR)
He also would not admit there was a liquidity problem when he limited trades in January.
And Keith Gill (Roaring Kitty), who made $48 million from a $53,000 investment in GameStop, came off as a likable, honest guy. Although, he may need those profits to defend himself against at least one proposed class-action. (Complaint)
Other newsy bits
Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) added laser eyes to her Twitter profile pic, confounding the political press and turning bitcoiners into a bunch of cooing babies (Slate)
A few years ago, the SEC shut down the entirely fraudulent ICO market. A sudden shutdown of the DeFi money market (DMM) may be the start of the next regulatory wave. (David Gerard)
The U.S. Treasury Department accused crypto payments platform BitPay of facilitating over 2,100 transactions with individuals in sanctioned nations. BitPay will pay $500,000 to settle the charges. (Coindesk,enforcement notice)
JP Morgan calls Tether an unbacked wildcat bank. “A sudden loss of confidence in USDT would likely generate a severe liquidity shock to Bitcoin markets, which could lose access to by far the largest pools of demand and liquidity,” analysts said. (Bloomberg)
FTX, one of Tether’s biggest customers, claims on Twitter that its volume and customer numbers are real. All you need is an email to set up an account—no KYC for tier 0, 1 accounts with up to $9,000 USD daily withdrawal,* which means anyone can set up any number of alias accounts. Trading volume is a meaningless number due to robot trading and probably wash trading.
Stephen Diehl on Bitcoin mining: “The Crypto Chernobyl.” (blog post)
BitMEX’s Arthur Hayes—who was indicted in October and is still at large—has resurfaced to argue the Robinhood shutdown was orchestrated by financial elites. This is a sign that retail investors should buy crypto, he said. (Cointelegraph)(Tweet)
Black is back. My opening salvo for 2021 just dropped called Walkaway, I look forward to reengaging with everyone via fortnightly publications. It's a #bitcoin bull market, if you mess with the bull you get the horns. https://t.co/iiJ65oAxeQpic.twitter.com/frJ1L15kJt
*Updated to note FTX has no KYC on both tier 0, 1 accounts. In an earlier version of this newsletter, I said you did not need KYC to withdraw up to $1,000. But it’s actually up to $9,000 per day for high-volume accounts.
**Updated March 2: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Coinbase routed the Tesla order to OTC desks, so as not to “crash” the price of BTC. This is incorrect. A large order would lift the market. Story has been altered to reflect that.
Feature image: Ship of fools depicted in a 1549 German woodcut
Previously, I wrote that QuadrigaCX cofounders Michael Patryn and the now-deceased Gerald Cotten worked together for a period at Midas Gold, a Liberty Reserve exchanger that ran from 2008 until May 2013, when it was pulled offline. Now it appears that their connections stretch back even further.
According to data gathered by Reddit user QCXINT, the two business partners were active on TalkGold, a popular forum for pushing high-yield investment programs, aka Ponzi schemes, as early as 2003. Likely, that is where they first met. Evidence also suggests the two were active on BlackHatWorld, a site for discussing dubious marketing strategies for websites. Cotten also appears to have been a Ponzi operator himself.
This is a long post, so here is a quick summary of what’s ahead:
Cotten began promoting Ponzi schemes in his teens.
He was posting on TalkGold under the username “Sceptre.”
Michael Patryn, aka Omar Dhanani, posted on TalkGold as “Patryn.”
“Patryn” and “Sceptre” joined TalkGold in 2003, within months of each other.
Michael Patryn also posted as “Patryn” on MoneyMakerGroup and BlackHatWorld.
“Sceptre” first appeared on BlackHatWorld in 2012, but changed his profile name to “Murdoch1337.”
“Sceptre” posted as “Lucky-Invest” on TalkGold to promote a Ponzi.
What is a high-yield investment program?
HYIP schemes typically promise ridiculously high rates of returns, but behind the scenes, no real investment is taking place. The operator simply uses money from new investors to pay off earlier ones, all the while skimming funds off the top for himself. When the supply of new investors runs dry, the scheme collapses. All Ponzi schemes collapse at some point.
Flimflam man Charles Ponzi, 1920.
Ponzi schemes are nothing new. The name stems from Charles Ponzi, an Italian immigrant who defrauded tens of thousands of Bostonians out of $18 million in 1920. Ponzi went to jail, and when he got out, the U.S. promptly deported him to Italy. New York financier Bernie Madoff ran a $65 billion Ponzi, the largest in history. His Ponzi fell apart during the financial crisis when too many customers started trying to pull their money out. Madoff was convicted in 2008.
In the early 2000s, the internet and the advent of early centralized digital currencies, like E-gold and Liberty Reserve, saw a new wave of Ponzi schemes. Operators anonymously set up their storefronts online and used e-currencies to obscure the source and flow of funds.
HYIP operators typically rely on social media and referrals to create hype and make their offerings appear legitimate. Despite the red flags, many people invest in HYIPs, thinking that if they get in early enough, they can make a buck.
An entire subculture has proliferated around HYIPs. There are sites that track and monitor HYIPs, and forums where people go to promote and learn more about HYIPs. There’s even an HYIP subreddit.
When an HYIP scheme collapses, the collapse is generally blamed on a hack, a theft, or a bad investment—some type of external event that is plausibly at arm’s length from the operator. When that happens, the HYIP operator begins issuing “refunds”—in good faith, of course.
Some HYIP operators even go to the effort of setting up long-winded spreadsheets and paying back dribs and drabs over months. Naturally, the first people to get paid back are generally insiders or the operators themselves—under different names—who then proclaim what a great guy the operator is, and how decent it is of him to spend all of his time and effort refunding everyone.
The U.S. Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), the regulatory body charged with governing business between brokers, dealers and the investing public, writes that “virtually every HYIP we have seen bears hallmarks of fraud.”
TalkGold and MoneyMakerGroup
Starting in January 2003, TalkGold and sister site MoneyMakerGroup were two hugely popular internet forums for launching and promoting HYIPs. The sites were pulled offline on August 21, 2017, a day after the Department of Justice filed an asset forfeiture complaint against the Krassenstein brothers, Edward and Brian, who ran the sites. Homeland Security raided the twins’ Florida homes a month later.
“Since at least 2003, Brian and Edward Krassenstein … have owned and operated websites devoted to the promotion of fraudulent HYIPs. In particular, the Krassenstein run sites ‘talkgold.com’ and ‘moneymakergroup.com’ are discussion forums in which HYIP operators advertise and promote their fraud schemes to potential victims.”
Patryn on TalkGold
Michael Patryn, formerly Omar Dhanani, was arrested in October 2004 on charges related to his involvement with Shadowcrew, a cybercrime message board. Operating under the pseudonym “Voleur,” French for thief, he offered Shadowcrew members an e-money laundering service—wire him cash, and he would fund your E-gold account, helping to obscure your financial trail.
After the Shadowcrew bust, TalkGold users began to speculate that “Patryn,” a prolific poster on TalkGold, was in fact, Dhanani—and there is good reason to suspect that he was.
“Patryn” joined TalkGold on April 3, 2003. His profile linked directly to VFS Network, a network for several digital currency exchangers, including three that Patryn himself operated: Midas Gold, HD Money, and Triple Exchange. VFS Network (stands for Voleur Financial Services) was also his business.
“Patryn” also openly admits on TalkGold that he operates Midas Gold. The business registration for Midas Gold also lists “Omar Patryn” (one of Patryn’s known aliases) as its sole director.
Further, Patryn appears to have used the profile name “Patryn” on MoneyMakerGroup, with the same link to VFS Network. He joined MoneyMakerGroup on November 27, 2007, six months after he got out of a U.S. federal prison, where he served 18 months related to his earlier Shadowcrew arrest.
Sceptre on TalkGold
Cotten was likely “Sceptre” on TalkGold. Sceptre joined TalkGold on July 4, 2003, three months after “Patryn” joined. Cotten would have been 15 or 16, at the time.
TalkGold members were able to list “friends” on the site. A May 2013 profile page for Patryn shows that he had six friends—one of whom is Sceptre. Similarly, a May 2013 profile page for Sceptre shows he had one friend—“Patryn.”
The two also interacted. Many of Sceptre’s TalkGold posts appear alongside Patryn’s in the same thread, either promoting or defending VFS Network, Midas Gold, or one of the other exchanges that Patryn operated. (There is also evidence to suggest that Cotten, not Patryn, was the main operator for Midas Gold.)
On December 7, 2009, when a user on TalkGold complains that he is having issues with Midas Gold, Sceptre replies: “I’ve never had any problems with M-Gold. They are usually very efficient.” Patryn follows on the same thread with, “M-Gold does not work during weekends. What is your order reference number? I will have it taken care of ASAP.”
On September 29, 2012, “Patryn” responds to someone complaining about Midas Gold keeping their money. (This was not unusual, by the way. There were many complaints about Midas Gold withholding customer funds. See here, here and here.)
“Patryn” writes:
“To the best of my knowledge, both of us have been responding to your emails. You sent me five emails yesterday demanding that I hurry up and resolve this issue. Your issue will be resolved ASAP. Unfortunately, I cannot force the banks to speed up their investigation process.”
In the same thread, Sceptre replies to “Patryn,” almost mocking the customer.
“lol, I’m surprised you’re willing to help him. You offer your dispute resolution for free, and he thanks you by spamming your inbox and complaining that you don’t reply while you’re sleeping.”
In September 2012, a poster asks, “I am looking for a LR Exchanger into HD-Money.” (Basically, the poster wants to convert one digital currency, Liberty Reserve, into another, HD-Money, without having to go through fiat). Sceptre replies, “For this type of trade I would use ecashworldcard.” Patryn follows by posting a link to his HD-Money site, which lists Ecash World Card as an offering.
Cotten and Patryn on BlackHatWorld
BlackHatWorld is a forum where people go to discuss “black hat” marketing tactics. Paid shilling (paying someone to promote your product on social media), negative SEO attacks (improving your SEO ranking by destroying your competitor’s) and gaming a search engine’s algorithm are all topics of discussion on this forum.
These tactics are generally used by Websites that only plan to stick around long enough to make a quick financial gain, which is exactly what HYIPs aim to do.
Someone going by “Patryn” was also active on BlackHatWorld. This person joined on September 6, 2012, and was last active on September 7, 2017. He only posted nine messages.
Another poster—”Murdoch1337″—in BlackHatWorld, was much more active. He joined on February 12, 2012, and his last activity was January 8, 2017. This person appears to have previously been posting as Sceptre, and we believe this was Cotten.
(QXCINT also tells me that one of Cotten’s email accounts—g@mailhoose.com, which was tied to a number of Cotten’s domain registrations—has or had an active account on BlackHatWorld, but the method he used was too technical for me to confirm independently.)
Murdoch1337 appears as the original poster in a thread titled “Sceptre’s Spectacular Content Services!!! – $1.50 per 100 words” — an indication that Sceptre likely switched his profile name to Murdoch1337 sometime after he started the thread. He responds to other posters in the thread as if he is the one offering the content services. “That’s all the review copies for now,” he writes. “For everyone else, feel free to place your orders using the order info in my original post.”
On September 10, 2013, Murdoch1337 posts an ad for a developer to help him with an upcoming cryptocurrency exchange. In the ad, he writes:
“I am looking for a programmer who is familiar with Bitcoin to develop a website that is very similar to Bitstamp…Also, I’m looking to get this project built and online quickly, so if you are able to do it quickly, that is a bonus.”
This ad was posted three months before Quadriga launched in beta. The timing makes sense given that Quadriga was based on WLOX, an open-source exchange solution available on Github, which would have dramatically reduced the time it took to create a functioning crypto exchange. Alex Hanin built the Quadriga platform, though it is not clear if Cotten actually recruited Hanin via this ad on BlackHatWorld.
An almost identical ad with the title “Bitstamp clone – Bitcoin trading project” was posted on Freelancer.com.The job poster, who was anonymous, had 38 projects on the site. He left a few telling details behind on one ofthe projects:
Hi
I’m looking for programmers who are knowledgeable when it comes to Bitcoin and I found you.
I have a number of projects that need work, including a new Bitcoin exchange. Are you able to build sites like this? If so, i’d like to get in touch
Thanks
Gerry
Skype: gerrywc
email: sceptre@countermail.com.
S&S Investments and Lucky Invest
One of Sceptre’s HYIPs was S&S Investments, a website that opened for business on January 1, 2004. (“Copyright @2004 Sceptre” is written at the bottom of the page.) He promotes the scheme as a way to double your money.
“You invest a sum of money into the program and within 48 hours (usually within 18) you will receive a return of anything from 103% to 150%, possibly more.”
He is sure to point out that this is “not what is called a ponzi or pyramid scheme.” It offers returns that are far better!
In case the first offer sounded a little too far fetched, he changes the text later to something only slightly more believable. S&S now becomes a “fixed-term investment,” which pays 115% in a week….”you can invest and walk away in profit after just 7 days!”
Of course, S&S ultimately collapses, and discussion around it gets moved to the “Closed / Scammed Programs” section of TalkGold, where Sceptre continues to string along anxious investors, who continue to hold out hope for a “refund.” He writes:
“Refunds WILL take some time. I cannot guarantee that they will all be made quickly. The refund process is likely to spread over a long period of time, but I am willing to do my best to refund everyone to the best of my ability. Please be patient and you will receive a lovely surprise in your e-gold, a refund from S&S Investments,” Sceptre writes.
One TalkGold user reviewed what he considered to be the 12 biggest HYIP “scams” on TalkGold. This is what he wrote about S&S Investments:
“S&S Investments is an interesting program because it was operated by a ‘well known’ person in the HYIP arena. I use the quote marks, because this person was not well known at all, in fact he was very anonymous. No one knew his name, other than his nickname he used to post with, Sceptre. He used anonymous proxies, he was very well hidden. Yet because he had over 1000 posts on TalkGold, he earned a kind of pseudo-trust that people get from being very visible and always online.
Sceptre started off with a small little program that promised to pay back a large amount after a few days. It soon grew to become very, very popular, and it was not long before he upgraded to a fully automated script.
Sceptre wouldn’t tell people how he made the money, he just said that was his little secret. Virtually everyone invested into S&S Investments based on his post count on TalkGold. “He’s made a lot of posts on TalkGold, therefore he must be honest” seemed to be the general opinion of the investors.
S&S Investments went for sometime before cracks started to appear. First the website went offline, then was back again, but withdrawals weren’t being honoured, then the site went offline again. Finally, Sceptre made an announcement that S&S Investments were closed and refunds were to promised.
For a while, refunds did proceed, but then things started to dry up. Since the summer, no more refunds have been processed.
Hey, just because someone has thousands of posts on a forum, doesn’t mean he’s a trustworthy guy. Use your head, look at what the whole program is offering.”
In May 2004, Sceptre appears to switch to another TalkGold profile, “Lucky-Invest,” to promote a Lucky Invest HYIP.
At one point in a thread, he apparently forgets to log out of Lucky-Invest and continues responding as if he were Sceptre, until another poster calls him out:
“You forgot to sign in as ‘sceptre’. ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh . .. looks like Lucky-Invest changed their message!!! . . . too funny!!! . .. did you get caught Sceptre??? hahaha ;)”
Sceptre/Lucky-Invest replies:
“I’m not trying to hide. Lucky Invest, the Newest Investment/Game. My profits go to help pay refunds. THIS IS A GAME, IT WILL NOT HAVE ANY REFUNDS.”
This is a straight out admission that Lucky Invest was not an actual investment. It was a “game.” In other words, a fraud. Essentially, Sceptre/Lucky-Invest/Gerald Cotten is saying: When you give me your money, it is mine. There are no refunds in this game, just me sharing my profits.
Knowing that Cotten and Patryn did business together on TalkGold does not tell us where the CA$250 million worth of crypto and fiat that went missing on Quadriga went. (Only a fraction of those funds have been recovered so far.) But it does bring up questions. Was Cotten really just a starry-eyed Bitcoin libertarian? Or was he a seasoned con artist who had no qualms about taking other people’s money?
If you like my writing, consider supporting my work by subscribing to my Patreon for $5, $20, or $50 a month. Every little bit helps!
Amy Castor 