The Guardian Australia published an investigation several months ago about A A crypto system tilt scam called HyperVerse, a fund that used major celebrity endorsements to attract millions of dollars from small investors before it collapsed. Blockchain Global went bankrupt with $58 million in debt in 2021, but there's now a fairly classic scammer's bite in the tail: the CEO who promoted this scheme doesn't appear to be a real person.
HyperVerse was promoted by Blockchain Global founders Sam Lee and Ryan Xu, both of whom were referred to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission: Lee denies that HyperVerse was a scam and disputes his founder status, and Xu says nothing. But the company's CEO was Stephen Rhys-Lewis, who appeared at the chart's launch in late 2021 alongside HyperVerse-enabled video messages from, among others, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and actor Chuck Norris.
Stephen Rhys-Lewis, according to HyperVerse, graduated from the University of Leeds, took a master's degree from Cambridge, sold a company to Adobe, launched an IT startup, and so on. He also found time for a short stint at Goldman Sachs (Matt Taibbi described it memorably as “a great vampire squid that wraps itself around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells of money”) before apparently being sought out by the HyperVerse.
Lewis appeared in the HyperVerse launch video and you can watch it below. I invite you to consider whether this is a Cambridge graduate and Goldman Sachs operator, or an actor who is not quite aware of what he has signed up for: note especially the pronunciation of “HyperVerse”.
The problem is…none of these esteemed institutions have heard of Stephen Rhys-Lewis. The Guardian's follow-up found that neither the universities nor the companies mentioned nor Companies House (the UK's corporate registry) had any record of a person with that name. Adobe has never purchased a company owned by someone with that name, and Goldman Sachs has no record of it. His only online presence is associated with the HyperVerse, including an X account that was set up one month before the HyperVerse and which has since become inactive.
Of the company's (alleged) founders, Xu has been mostly inactive while Lee appears to be involved in all kinds of wrongdoing. HyperVerse is linked to another cryptocurrency scheme of its own called HyperFund and Lee is linked to several other cryptocurrency investment platforms including the incredibly ridiculous “We Are All Satoshi” platform. This is a reference to Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym of Bitcoin's founder, whose original idea of enabling the little guy to avoid central banking is now a far cry from the Wild West that hucksters and thieves have become.
A “cease and desist order” was issued to Lee in California to control the We Are All Satoshi scam, which she said was a “fraudulent pyramid and Ponzi scheme.”
Last year, Li briefly met with Hyper's investors after the collapse became apparent and encouraged them to “rebuild your tree.” I'm not sure anyone needs to hear the rest after that.
There is no figure for how many people might lose through Blockchain Global: estimates range from tens of millions to a few billion. This in itself says something fundamental about cryptocurrencies.
And it's perhaps fitting that Stephen Rhys-Lewis almost disappears into this article: after all, it seems very likely that he was never real to begin with. No one knows what's out there, and while we may all be Satoshi in spirit, nature is redder in tooth and claw.
