Founders of crypto scheme Forsage have been indicted in a $340 million crypto scam. The founders Lado, Lola Ferrari, Mike Mooney, and Sergey Maslakov were on 22nd of February, 2023 indicted by the Federal grand jury in the district of Oregon, and charged for allegedly leading a global Ponzi and pyramid scheme that collected about 340 million dollars from victims.
The accused four, Vladimir Okhotnikov aka Lado, Olena Oblamska aka Lola Ferrari, Mikhail Sergeev aka Mike Mooney or Gleb or Gleb Million, and Sergey Maslakov are Russian nationals who allegedly carried out the Ponzi scheme using the “smart contracts” which are self-executing contracts on the blockchain.
They allegedly coded and deployed these smart contracts on Ethereum, Binance smart chain, and Tron blockchains combining it with their pyramid scheme.
Analysis of Forsage’s smart contact allegedly showed that as soon as an investor purchases a “slot”, the smart contact is supposed to automatically divert the funds to other Forsage investors such that earlier investors are paid with the funds from later investors, however, block analytics confirmed that over 80% of the investors get a lesser amount of ETH back than the amount in the Forsage’s ethereum program and over 50% of investors don’t receive a single payout.
According to the court’s document, the Forsage codes show that the “xGold” smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain was connected fraudulently to siphon investors’ funds out of the Forsage investment method and into cryptocurrency accounts owned by the founders. This is contrary to what they told Forsage investors “100% of the Forsage income goes directly and transparently to the members of the project with zero risk”.
The investigation was done by the US postal inspection service {USPIS} in collaboration with the FBI and Homeland Security. According to the Inspector in charge, Eric Shen, “The US postal inspection service is committed to investigating those who engage in schemes involving cryptocurrency investment fraud”. Speaking on the case, Special Agent in charge, Ivan J. Arvelo of Homeland Security said “the technology may change but the scams remain the same”.
This goes to show that no matter the advancement in technology the legal judicial system advances in its knowledge such that the protection of lives and properties is always assured.
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