yes that are 'registered' as a limited company, but in the UK that basically mean the directors can 'try' and walk away, however they can be questioned about their activities.
the incorporation is anonymous. They paid about a thousand dollars using a digital e-currency to an anonymous skype vendor for the registration and SSL certificate. No ones real identity is attached to any of it who owns the program.
If they registered using false details and identification documents, etc then this constitutes a criminal offence. Also a Ponzi is money laundering whether it is using digital currency or not, numerous laws are broken by a Ponzi by itself including fraud and possibly conspiracy. If you suspect foul play then it can always be reported to the appropriate authorities, start with informing company’s house, greater London metropolitan police, UK cyber-crime police, crime stoppers, Europol, Interpol and any other appropriate agencies in your respective country and jurisdiction and they will work together if enough report it. At this time it could be too early to do this. If they used false documents and identities and were careful to cover their digital footprints (IP addresses and their internet connect among other things) then they may be difficult to trace and bring to justice. I have seen other Ponzi scheme criminals imprisoned, if the USA get involved they will extradite him and he would face a much more hefty long term prison sentence than in the UK/EU. Any crimes they determine committed will also not run concurrently as in the UK but consecutively. If he was found guilty of several crimes he would be facing 10-25 years or more in prison maybe...depends if the U.S. justice system is interested in getting involved and if they can recover the funds for their own treasury I guess.
I have known about two Ponzi scammers that worked together online and in person across Europe, one was held by Swedish justice under his own jurisdiction and the other one that was good at marketing suckers in for many years and leading them in with countless cover stories was extradited to the USA, he used numerous false identities and had a small team of employees working with him. I think they managed to steal/launder a few hundred million but I am not sure of the exact figure. In the case of the American government, they keep whatever money they recover, usually but the Swedish government were good to refund scammed victims if the money paper trail could be proven at every stage, where you got your money from to them all the way.
Maybe he will now try to payout some of the larger investors in the next couple of days and rip off the small time investors...who knows...he could just break them even. Then perhaps no bad karma will come to him. Will be interesting to see what happens here. Either way...justice can be slow to do its work so I am not holding out on that.
Let us know if you invested a substantial amount and managed to get paid.
I have a few ideas of how we may setup a fund for victims, but I am not sure how to organise it and we would need trusted, reputable users on here to participate. Maybe have an investment side to it so it is not merely sympathy donations which I doubt many if any will have time for.
Do you know how many short term HYIP's that have daily plans launch every year? The stats were also inflated like every short term program does. They probably ran with about 150-200k. There is no hope in going after oilrig, out of all HYIP's. Complete waste of time. People move onto the next short term HYIP. This one was an obvious HYIP ponzi. Don't tell me people actually here did not realize they were playing a ponzi game? You just need to suck up your loss and move onto the next game. You chose a bad one at a bad time, time to move onto greener pastures. Game over on oil rig.
