Just when you thought the crypto waters couldn’t get any choppier after the fall of TerraUSD and the sinking of Three Arrows Capital hedge fund and the Celsius crypto lending network, along comes another shocker.
Earlier this month the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged 11 individuals for allegedly running a $300 million (more than R5 billion) Ponzi scheme under the name Forsage.
The individuals charged include:
- Vladimir ‘Lado’ Okhotnikov, a Russian national, and co-founder of Forsage;
- An unknown individual pseudonymously known as Lola Ferrari;
- Mikail ‘Mike’ Sergeev, co-founder, believed to reside in Russia, with alleged prior experience in multilevel marketing (MLM);
- Sergey Maslakov, believed to reside in Russia, with alleged prior experience in MLM; and
- Several US residents engaged in aggressive promotion of the platform.
Followers of the Mirror Trading International (MTI) story will recognise the familiar outline of a scheme that relied on the roping in of new investors to fund the payouts of the older ones. Investors were offered returns of 10% a month, which were supposedly generated by a computerised bot – though no evidence of a successful bot was ever found. The MTI scheme was placed in liquidation in 2020.
Read:
In many respects, Forsage appears to have used the MTI playbook.
How it allegedly worked
According to the court filing, Forsage promoted itself through statements on its website and social media that claimed the…
