Some time ago I reported that some supposed Ukrainian crowdfunding website called Uinvest, which in reality is a Ponzi scheme, organized some kind of a conference in the United States on April 29 until May 1st. Among two people who pretended to be the Uinvest CEO and the Uinvest lawyer, the scheme also managed to get some celebrity speakers such as Tom Dreesen, Brock Pierce, Doron Basha, Peter Matthies and Ukrainian singer “TATI”. Also the CEO of WestPark Capital, Richard Rappaport, was present at the event. WestPark Capital is cooperating with the scheme on some advisory basis.
Uinvest was using the Liberty Reserve payment processor for its transactions. Liberty Reserve has been shut down on Friday one week ago in a joint action of Costa Rica and the United States. The CEO of Liberty Reserve, Arthur Budovsky, has been arrested
...in Spain and all computers and documents of the company have been seized. Liberty Reserve was an alleged $6 billion money laundering scheme and probably the biggest busted one in the history.
Among Liberty Reserve, Uinvest also accepted several other payment gateways through the help of their investors. People were able to take part in some “in-house money laundering scheme” and become a so-called “Financial Partner” or short “FP”. These FP’s were able to do some kind of exchanges together with other investors. They were allowed to place offers on a marketplace and investors who wanted to withdraw were able to accept these offers.
For example, one FP opens an offer for PayPal withdrawals with a 3% fee. Some investor takes advantage of it. The Financial Partner is accepting the offer and sends the funds from his ow
PayPal account to the PayPal account of the investor. The investor confirms the transaction and the Financial Partner gets the money + fees to his Uinvest account balance. It is the same process in the opposite direction for deposits to Uinvest.
This scheme is not only illegal, as it violates AML laws, it also takes a lot of liabilities of Uinvests Ponzi scheme, enabling it to last longer. But now as Liberty Reserve is gone, Uinvest has announced that they will not replace it with something new. So there is not a single direct payment method left at Uinvest. There is no way left for FPs to get paid at this time and also not for investors of the scheme, as FPs have stopped providing withdrawals or increased the fees to ridiculous amounts.
Thus, after over three years online Uinvest has now collapsed. It will most probably be just a matter of time until authorities start to take action.
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