Large Bitcoin Ponzi Scheme Collapses With a Loss of $5.6 Million

New submitter beltsbear writes "Despite the many people calling it out as a Ponzi scheme from the beginning, Pirateat40 was able to collect millions of dollars worth of Bitcoins from thousands of Bitcoin users. At almost every stage Pirateat40 copied the path of the EVE Online Ponzi scheme except on a much larger scale with a far more liquid take. Now, it has shut down, and investors are wondering where their digital currency went. Quoting: 'He claimed that BS&T was sitting on 500,000 BTC on the day of the shutdown, worth more than $5.6 million USD at today's price of $11.38. "Once my process is released you'll understand more of how coins move around," he told members of the Bitcoin community last week. Pirateat40 initially promised to refund his investors' Bitcoin deposits plus interest within a week, effectively admitting that he did not have the Bitcoins on hand. The fund normally paid out on Mondays, but last Monday and today have passed so far without refunds. BS&T investors are complaining loudly and so-called "pass-through" funds that invested with BS&T are shutting down. As of this writing, BS&T says there is "no ETA on payments."'"

Comments

No sympathy

[1u3hr]

But the guy for fraud, sure, but the "investors" were idiots.

Re:No sympathy

[Anonymous Coward]

But the guy for fraud, sure, but the "investors" were idiots.

I wouldn't call them idiots for investing, but they can't complain when they lose all of their unregulated currency to a Ponzi scheme.

Re:No sympathy

[Theophany]

Maybe this is a bit obvious, but if a guy going by the handle pirateat40 is asking to invest my money, I'm a retard for not being justalittlefuckingbit sceptical.

Re:No sympathy

[slim]

"A real scammer would never put the word 'pirate' in his handle. Therefore this guy must be trustworthy..."

Re:No sympathy

[gigaherz]

Anything is a valid currency if people give a value to it. If you spend money to get bitcoin (electricity used to run the gpu), and use bitcoin to buy stuff, then it means bitcoin is a currency. Also he stole bits, not pixels. Digital bits can be coins the same way real coins are metal that's put into the shape of a coin.

Re:No sympathy

[Lumpy]

you little kids miss the clues, doing too much pot in the van with shaggy does that to you...

Pirateat40 = Pirate at 40 or a Jimmy buffett song. the guy is a Jimmy Buffett fan, therefore an old guy.

Re:No sympathy

[Talderas]

Or the guy is brilliant, figured that old guys would be more trusted, and used that nick.

Not really about Bitcoin

[slim]

Every time there's a BitCoin story, people loudly claim it's a Ponzi scheme. Maybe they're right.

But it's worth pointing out that this story is not the story that vindicates that claim. This is a story about a Ponzi scheme that happens to have been conducted using Bitcoins.

To claim that this shows Bitcoins are a Ponzi scheme is like saying that C is a virus because you can write virii using C.

It might be the case that this Ponzi scheme couldn't have been conducted using (say) US$ because of financial regulation. Lack of financial regulation attracts some people to Bitcoin -- but look how it can bite.

Re:Not really about Bitcoin

[cgt]

To claim that this shows Bitcoins are a Ponzi scheme is like saying that C is a virus because you can write virii using C.

"virii" is not a word. The correct plural of "virus" is simply "viruses".

Re:Not really about Bitcoin

[IamTheRealMike]

Every time there's a BitCoin story, people loudly claim it's a Ponzi scheme. Maybe they're right.

Or maybe they're just spewing buzzwords without understanding what they mean. Bitcoin itself is not a ponzi scheme and that's obvious to anyone with a dictionary. A ponzi scheme is a scheme where "investors" are paid from deposits from new investors. Obviously such a scheme must always grow in order to make payments and that means it is guaranteed to eventually collapse. As nobody sane would invest in something that explicitly advertised itself as a ponzi, such schemes always involve secrecy and obfuscation.

Bitcoin, being a currency, is not an investment (although some people may be tempted to use it that way). It does not claim to offer any particular returns. There is no secrecy or obfuscation, you can read the papers and check the code to see exactly what it's doing.

It might be the case that this Ponzi scheme couldn't have been conducted using (say) US$ because of financial regulation.

Given that by the time the SEC forcibly closed ZeekRewards it was reported to have had over a million investors and $600 million at play, I think it's safe to say that regulation is not a guarantee against getting scammed. At any rate, Bitcoin is not unregulated. If you're running an investment scheme in the USA you'd be required to register with the SEC regardless of currency used, and in fact one unregistered Bitcoin investment scheme operator in Brazil was already fined by the Brazilian equivalent for failing to do so.

Re:Not really about Bitcoin

[mellyra]

Every time there's a BitCoin story, people loudly claim it's a Ponzi scheme. Maybe they're right.

Or maybe they're just spewing buzzwords without understanding what they mean. Bitcoin itself is not a ponzi scheme and that's obvious to anyone with a dictionary. A ponzi scheme is a scheme where "investors" are paid from deposits from new investors. Obviously such a scheme must always grow in order to make payments and that means it is guaranteed to eventually collapse. As nobody sane would invest in something that explicitly advertised itself as a ponzi, such schemes always involve secrecy and obfuscation.

Bitcoin is not a ponzi scheme but it behaves similar to one - the increasing mining difficulty and limited overall amount of coins heavily rewards early adopters (who hoard their bitcoins) if and if only these early adopters can convince the latecomers that bitcoins actually have value (otherwise cashing out becomes hard).

Your ability to sell the bitcoins you mined at a low difficulty for ridiculous amounts of dollars later on is entirely dependent on the growth of the overall bitcoin scheme - and as bitcoins do currently have very limited value as use for transactions (few stores accept them, usually cheaper to pay in dollars than btcs if the stores accept them, high volatility makes accepting them difficult for business, people would be stupid to spend them giving their deflationary nature) the main motivation to get some bitcoins is to profit off the demand that will be created by those that want to get into bitcoin after you.

Re:Not really about Bitcoin

[FireFury03]

Bitcoin itself is not a ponzi scheme and that's obvious to anyone with a dictionary. A ponzi scheme is a scheme where "investors" are paid from deposits from new investors. Obviously such a scheme must always grow in order to make payments and that means it is guaranteed to eventually collapse.

It isn't a ponzi scheme, but it does resemble one in some ways:

With a ponzi scheme, the early investors make great returns due to the influx of later investors. The returns gradually diminish as time goes on because the money from new investors has to be spread more thinly, the early investors get to cash out before the whole thing collapses.

With bitcoin, early investors get a lot of bitcoins (as they are easy to produce at the start). Later investors don't get so many, and as more and more investors enter the scheme, the currency gets spread more thinly and therefore each bitcoin gains value. The early investors still have their big stack of bitcoins, which now have considerably more value than when they started due to the increasing scarcity of bitcoins amoungst the later investors. The scheme may or may not eventually collapse, but either way the early investors are left with huge gains and the ability to cash out before anything bad happens.

As nobody sane would invest in something that explicitly advertised itself as a ponzi, such schemes always involve secrecy and obfuscation.

I'm not sure that's necessarilly true. Ponzi schemes *do* make a lot of money for the early investors, so it would be reasonably sane to enter such a scheme if the scheme is very new, then cash-out before it goes tits-up. Without some inside knowledge about the scheme, it would be pretty risky though because you don't know whether you are going to be an early investor or a late investor (who will lose all their money).

Bitcoin, being a currency, is not an investment

Currencies are frequently used as investments. Anything that fluctuates in value can be used as an investment (shares, currencies, properties, etc) - with all these things, the trick is to buy when it has a low value and sell when it has a high value. This is probably even more reason to invest in bitcoin, since the increasing scarcity of the coins is likley to gradually drive the value up (assuming the currency doesn't fall into disuse).

Re:Not really about Bitcoin

[ratbag]

One of the hackneyed excuses for spelling or grammar mistakes is to say that language is mutating.

Re:Not really about Bitcoin

[m.ducharme]

Bitcoin is not a ponzi scheme but it behaves similar to one - the increasing mining difficulty and limited overall amount of coins heavily rewards early adopters (who hoard their bitcoins) if and if only these early adopters can convince the latecomers that bitcoins actually have value (otherwise cashing out becomes hard).

That's not a ponzi scheme, that's a pyramid scheme.

Re:Not really about Bitcoin

[Rogerborg]

just use "viruses" for FSM's sake

Fringe cultist demands use of biological weapons, news at 11.

Re:Not really about Bitcoin

[IamTheRealMike]

This argument comes up repeatedly, but it's ridiculous. It's very often the case that new technologies reward early adopters who do nothing beyond "leech", but practical experience shows that the big winners are always people who create real value.

Maybe an example makes things clearer. If you were an early adopter of the internet then you would have had the chance to obtain huge IP blocks and tons of domain names for virtually nothing, these are scarce resources that would later become very valuable. But if you asked the man on the street to name some internet millionaires, chances are they would name people like Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, maybe Marc Andreseen and so on. People who built real businesses and real value. In practice although domain speculators did and do exist, the world is not awash in a lazy elite of people who just camped on scarce resources for decades. Nor does the existence of a small number of these people make the internet "behave similar to a ponzi scheme".

Whilst Bitcoin certainly does have people who did nothing beyond buy up coins early and sell them later, there are also tons of early adopters (like me) who are creating real value by writing software, running services, being merchants, mining and so on. These people risk something very real - usually their time and capital - to build the system, and they may or may not do very well financially out of it. Just like any new technology. Your grist with miners is particularly bizarre because the people who mined on Bitcoin when the coins were worth little/nothing were actually sacrificing real capital (for electricity/cpus) to provide security to a system that was extremely small and unlikely to go anywhere.

By the way, the people who mined coins when it was very easy didn't know Bitcoin would take off. A lot of the early coins have been lost because for around 1.5 years Bitcoin was merely an interesting piece of open source software. The coins had no value and there were no exchanges, but mining had real cost in terms of electricity, pegged CPUs and so on. So people would mine or get some coins, get bored and delete the software/not back up their wallets, etc.

The chocolate game

[georgeaperkins]

These 'too good to be true' schemes always take me back to primary school, when there was a letter going round: Free chocolates for everyone: Please send me 1 chocolate and then send this letter to 5 friends. Everyone gets 5 chocolates just for buying one. Amazing! I was so upset when my dad refused to buy me the one chocolate. How could he not understand!!! My friend who gave me the letter was equally outraged with me. Everyone around was getting free chocolates. Of course there were losers in the end. At least I learned an important lesson about schemes which seem too good to be true.

Is Bitcoin trace-able ?

[Taco Cowboy]

I know the title is ridiculous, but everything about this scam henge on it
 
Normal paper-based cash are almost un-traceable, that is why petty criminals often get to spend the cash that they robbed from old ladies
 
If Bitcoin is untraceable, then the masterminds behind this ponzi-scheme get to "spend" their ill-gotten loot as well, without being identified
 
I use Bitcoin, but I am not well verse with all the details
 
If I were to scam someone and got his Bitcoin, could I spend them, without being identified?

Re:Is Bitcoin trace-able ?

[eugene2k]

It's traceable, but it's not easy to trace. I remember there was a paper on the traceabilty of bitcoin transactions. Google it if you're interested.

P.S. If you were to scam ppl using bitcoin, right now you can probably get away with it, because complaining to the authorities won't help you in any way.

Re:Is Bitcoin trace-able ?

[jhoegl]

See, this is why regulation is bad. Bad people are prevented from setting up schemes.
Schemes that are only obvious to those that are educated on such things.
Turrble!

Re:Is Bitcoin trace-able ?

[Lumpy]

"Schemes that are only obvious to those that are educated on such things."

you mean like the super secret education that "you cant get something for nothing" and "a fool and his money are soon parted" ?

There have always been idiots, there will always be idiots. and as long as there are idiots, you will have crooks that take their money this way.

Re:Is Bitcoin trace-able ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitcoin Saving and Trust: "7% per week return. The operators methods cannot be disclosed. The operator is essentially anonymous."

The only education required for an honest person to hesitate from investing here is basic reading comprehension and the wisdom not to believe everything they read. If you lack either of these then please avoid Bitcoin until appropriate regulations have been applied, thank you.

Re:Is Bitcoin trace-able ?

[Talderas]

Interest on accounts is not something for nothing. There is an very obvious opportunity costs that comes with depositing your money. You lose control of it and you lose some access to it.

Look at interest bearing back accounts. There's typically a minimum balance that must be kept before you're assessed fees. CDs close off access entirely. Even in no account minimum interest bearing accounts you will often have to go into the bank itself (time) in order withdrawal all the funds and close the account.

The only real reason those accounts appear to be something for nothing is because the banks you deposit at are insured by the FDIC so you can't get scammed and the reality is that the only banks an American is likely to deal with that are not FDIC insured are international banks or are scams.

Re:Is Bitcoin trace-able ?

[bickerdyke]

Interest on accounts is not something for nothing. There is an very obvious opportunity costs that comes with depositing your money. You lose control of it and you lose some access to it.

Yes, and that's exactly the same what this scheme promised: let me control your bitcoins for a while and you'll get them back later - with intrests.

So this alone was no criteria for recognizing a scam.

Re:Is Bitcoin trace-able ?

[DrXym]

And bitcoin investors by virtue of buying bitcoins have saved the scammers a lot of effort by identifying themselves as easy marks. Much like how some scammers operate on church congregations, MLM members, timeshare owners, people who've bought cures "they" don't know want you to know etc. By virtue of the fact that rational people would run a mile from these things, the scammers know that those who remain are far richer pickings.

Re:Is Bitcoin trace-able ?

[slim]

Yes, and that's exactly the same what this scheme promised: let me control your bitcoins for a while and you'll get them back later - with intrests.

So this alone was no criteria for recognizing a scam.

The clue is "with interest vastly in excess of market levels".

The higher the promised interest, the less plausible it is. (Yes, I don't find hedge funds particularly plausible).

Re:Is Bitcoin trace-able ?

[bloodhawk]

The scheme was promising 7% return per week. Even among the gullible and greedy it takes a special breed of idiot to believe such guarentees can be anything but a scam.

Re:Is Bitcoin trace-able ?

[CrimsonAvenger]

The scheme was promising 7% return per week. Even among the gullible and greedy it takes a special breed of idiot to believe such guarentees can be anything but a scam.

Hmm, that's 3270-odd percent per year.

Yah, it takes a special breed of idiot to buy into that.

Re:Is Bitcoin trace-able ?

[fustakrakich]

If it wasn't for idiots, the economy would have tanked thousands of years ago. No politician could ever get elected into office. It would be anarchy. Idiocy, and money make the world go 'round.

Re:Is Bitcoin trace-able ?

[slim]

How do you make interest on a currency that is that fixed?

The same way you make interest on any currency.

You put $10 in the bank. The bank gives me $10. I spend that $10 on tending an apple tree. I sell the apples for $14. I pay back $12 to the bank (20% interest) and keep $2 for myself. The bank adds $1 to your balance (10% interest) and keeps $1 for itself.

Re:Is Bitcoin trace-able ?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Yes, this is banking without any regulation. The FDIC does some background checking on banks and steps in when there is trouble. In the absence of such a trusted third party performing due diligence, you the individual must perform the same level of investigation to determine if its a trustworthy source for depositing money. The reason why they are stupid for investing or depositing in this scheme, is that they didn't do that research or even recognize the need for it.

Re:Is Bitcoin trace-able ?

[makomk]

The part you're missing is the brigade of shills on the Bitcoin forums who called anyone that pointed out that this was a Ponzi a troll and insisted that they were just too stupid to figure out how the operator of the scheme had managed to achieve such good returns. (Some of them even insisted that they knew how he was doing it, though they consistently refused to actually say.) Social conformity is a powerful thing; a lot of people are willing to put their concerns aside and do really foolish things so long as everyone around them is telling them that they're idiots for not doing them.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

It's About the Unique Features of BitCoin

[eldavojohn]

It might be the case that this Ponzi scheme couldn't have been conducted using (say) US$ because of financial regulation. Lack of financial regulation attracts some people to Bitcoin -- but look how it can bite.

No, your C to Bitcoin analogy is a bit flawed. If C had a unique trait that was unique from all other computing languages that made it insulated and without consequences for virus writers (and this is impossible) than it would be a valid analogy. The problem is that all other currencies have some entity backing them that has a motive to or already does instituted financial regulation -- like stopping ponzi schemes. And the logic for this is quite simple. If you don't protect idiots, then idiots can't use your currency. Since much of the population is idiots, you need to protect them from the really bad stuff that comes along with capitalism -- otherwise your system starts to look really shitty and third world really fast.

So, there's no way to fix this with BitCoin because that's the great thing about BitCoin: no government regulation or government backing. I suspect you're going to start to hear more and more stories like: lack of security in major BitCoin trading systems (with no repercussions), more ponzi-like activity (with no repercussions) and more child porn/drugs/etc bought with BitCoin (with no repercussions). And then once it becomes evident that there are no repercussions? Just watch the copycats copy.

So, yeah I find your BitCoin is like C really really flawed. But of course, if anyone thinks that BitCoin is the currency of the future and there are finite BitCoins, it only makes sense to move all of your liquid assets and investments to BitCoin so put your money with your mouth is if you want to defend BitCoin and that will be the most effective way to validate this currency.

Re:It's About the Unique Features of BitCoin

[alphatel]

If you don't protect idiots, then idiots can't use your currency. Since much of the population is idiots, you need to protect them from the really bad stuff that comes along with capitalism -- otherwise your system starts to look really shitty and third world really fast.

So, there's no way to fix this with BitCoin because that's the great thing about BitCoin: no government regulation or government backing. I suspect you're going to start to hear more and more stories like: lack of security in major BitCoin trading systems (with no repercussions), more ponzi-like activity (with no repercussions) and more child porn/drugs/etc bought with BitCoin (with no repercussions).

So you're now going to argue the SEC protects citizens and catches ponzi crooks before all is lost? Wrong century!
The useless government isn't going to do squat for real money or anything else. If your BC community is about helping each other and someone blatantly steals your virtual cash, you now know that you can't trust your fellow man without some virtual credibility. In this case the scammer had none, but people went for it anyway.

Re:It's About the Unique Features of BitCoin

[Kjella]

However Bitcoin has limited and predictable inflation which eventually stops entirely, so (in theory) it's quite possible to just build up savings. With a stable monetary base the value of your savings basically tracks overall change in GDP. If the economy grows at 2% per year, the value of your savings does too. No investment required, though obviously nothing stops you investing if you want to try and beat general economic growth.

I've rarely seen so much wrong rolled up into a few sentences. Inflation means that the purchasing power of your money goes down over time, the quantity of Bitcoin is known but the value is not so saying it has a predictable inflatioin is just ridiculous. Yes, printing of money is one of the things causing inflation but far from the only one. Like you say in the next sentence, the purchasing power will continue to change also after all Bitcoins are assigned an an increasing value we'd call deflation - it's just negative inflation. But let us talk closer about the steady stead.

With a steady state, whoever owns Bitcoins own a fixed fraction of the total Bitcoin economy - not to be confused with the GDP of any country or the world. If you own 1% of the Bitcoins, you own 1% of the economy whether that's worth a million, a billion, a trillion or nothing at all. So if 10 times as many people want to use Bitcoins, all the existing money will be worth 10 times as much. If 90% (leaving 1/10th) leaves, your money will drop to 1/10th of the value.

Actually it's worse than that because most of the Bitcoins are not liquid, In order to be able to buy Bitcoins somebody must be willing to sell them, and already today most of them are hoarded. What it means is that the people who actually want to use Bitcoins are buying and selling from an even smaller pool of money, the whole actual economy must fit within just a fraction of the total Bitcoins. And it gets very susceptible to flash crashes if the hoarders stampede, on top of the chance that people abandon the currency.

Either way, the system keeps getting stuffed with more and more "old money" which means you have to be crazier and crazier to invest as you get less and less Bitcoins for your dollars while the existing Bitcoin owners profit from deflation. The early adopters have the most to gain and the last ones in most to lose, eventually new people will cease to join and the panic will start in the other direction as the Bitcoins only have value as long as anyone else accepts Bitcoins.

Stock Market is a little bit different

[Taco Cowboy]

You mentioned the Apple stock and the hot-potato nature of it --- but stock market itself is a little bit different from Ponzi Scheme
 
The rise of Apple stocks is not totally due to the perception of Apple Inc is worth what and what billions, but rather ---- The world we live in, right now, is being flooded with too much liquidity, and those excess cash is looking for each and every way to stay ahead of the curve, and Apple Inc just so happened to become the "safe haven" for the time being, until ...
 
... as you mentioned, when people starting to realize that Apple Inc ain't worth that much in the first place, and a crash will commence
 

Alert the Bitcoin regulatory agency!

[Arancaytar]

oh wait.

(But seriously, can the SEC even touch him? If not, that imparts a serious lesson to everyone who uses BC for financial trading rather than just an online payment method.)

Misunderstood... like all other financial markets.

[Delgul]

As a fallout from this news, the Bitcoin rate has dropped roughly 30% (even around 50% for a short while). Why? No one seems to know. Whatever the scam, this _should_ have had near-zero impact on the exchange rate of the Bitcoin and the drop can only be explained by people panicking and selling off their coins. No matter, I made a nice extra when the rates bounced back from -50% to -30%, but it goes a long way to show how many people do not have a real inkling of how financial markets really work.

Really... where is this any different from 'conventional' financial markets?

Not a Ponzi scheme.

[udachny]

While I am not myself in Bitcoin and would not recommend it, it's not because it's a 'ponzi' scam, it's not. It's because there is no intrinsic value behind these electronic means of exchange, they don't store value. Yes, they can act as means of exchange and units of account, but the third property of money is lost - store of value.

Same exact problem is with fiat money in terms of store of value - they don't have that property, specifically because the interest rates are manipulated by the government (or pseudo-government agency, like the Fed), and the money is created out of thin air. That's the reason gov't hates real money, it wants fiat, because it allows the gov't to give promises that it doesn't have to pay for by raising taxes, instead it prints and destroys the very value of money.

But Bitcoins are not a ponzi scam it's the opposite, there is no exponential growth of Bitcoins, it's the reversed pyramid, the number of people with Bitcoins diminishes over time, so that is an unfair qualification for it.

--

American problems and solutions in 24 minutes.

Re:Not a Ponzi scheme.

[Great Big Bird]

There is no such thing as intrinsic value. Gold and silver only have value because we give it that. The same thing with a fiat currency, both are based on a faith in its value.

Re:MPU

[Caesar Tjalbo]

Surely you mean 'modpointii'.

Re:Misunderstood... like all other financial marke

[erroneus]

Yes. There will be no government bailouts of Bitcoin.