Prance Gold Holdings has ceased paying withdrawal requests.
In a bizarre communication pushed out to its affiliates, the company is claiming several cryptocurrency exchanges are under audit by US authorities.
Prance Gold Holdings is a Ponzi scheme that launched a few months ago. The company is fronted by “Andre Gerald”, a fictional CEO played by an actor.
Prance Gold is believed to be run by scammers operated out of south-east Asia.
Prance Gold solicited investments of up to $30,000 at at time, on the promise of a 600% ROI.
As traffic to Prance Gold’s website flatlined in September, so did new investment.
This prompted Prance Gold to push a 45% a month advertising campaign, up from the original ~27% a month offer.
The new ROI plan was supposed to start in October.
On October 1st Prance Gold ceased paying withdrawal requests.
Desperate investors initially put this down to festival celebrations in China. Said celebrations wrapped up around the 7th however, and still Prance Gold wasn’t paying out.
With existing withdrawal requests pending, on October 12th Prance Gold began accepting additional withdrawal requests.
Affiliates were told they’d be paid on the 15th. That didn’t happen, prompting Prance Gold affiliates to panic.
On October 16th Prance Gold sought to calm investors with the following announcement.
US Cryptocurrency Enforcement Framework
Greetings,
US Attorney General Barr announced a radical cryptocurrency enforcement framework on October 8, 2020, and last week began regulating radical financial transactions in blockchain transactions that passed through US servers.
High-profile arrests have been made, including the “pump and dump” cryptocurrency scheme and billionaire John McAfee suspected of tax evasion.
Under this comprehensive framework, Prance Gold’s large number of arbitrage accounts are suspended across Binance, Huobi, and Bittrex until an audit by the authorities.
We provide full cooperation to the authorities and strive to resolve the issue as soon as possible.
Due to our large customer base and the complexity of tracking every money trail in each client’s blockchain, we are optimistic that we will be able to resolve everything by early 2021.
We apologize for any inconvenience, and we are facing the biggest challenge so far.
We appreciate your understanding and cooperation.
We will strive to resume normal operation as soon as possible, while providing regular updates on this issue.
If you have any questions regarding notifications, please feel free to contact our market representatives.
Thank you very much!
Quite the bullshit sandwich!
Let’s start with John McAfee.
McAfee was indeed indicted on October 5th for tax evasion. There was no new laws enacted to secure McAfee’s arrest and it has nothing to do with cryptocurrency or Prance Gold.
As for AG Barr’s “cryptocurrency enforcement network”; A report was published by the DOJ on October 1st, detailing efforts by the DOJ to combat cryptocurrency fraud since 2018.
Again, publication of the report wasn’t accompanied by any new laws. And outside of Prance Gold using cryptocurrency to commit securities fraud, the report itself has nothing to do with Prance Gold.
To the extent exchange accounts Prance Gold was using to run its Ponzi scheme have been frozen, I wasn’t able to confirm this.
Neither Binance, Huobi, or Bittrex have issued a statement confirming Prance Gold’s claims.
To summarize; Prance Gold’s announcement is typical crypto Ponzi exit-scam nonsense.
The take-away from the announcement is Prance Gold has suspended withdrawals until “early 2021”.
This gives the company’s anonymous owners plenty of time to do a runner.
By coming up with bullshit excuses and citing recent enforcement actions that have nothing to do with them, Prance Gold avoids admitting reality: withdrawals exceeded investment and the admins want out with what’s left.
Dangling an “early 2021” return is to discourage investors from filing reports with authorities.
At the time of publication Alexa ranks Japan as the primary source of traffic to Prance Gold’s website (93%).
To date I’m not aware of Japanese authorities investigating or taking any action against Prance Gold and/or local promoters.
Between Watford Corp pretending its website was seized by the SEC and Prance Gold claiming the DOJ froze it’s crypto exchange accounts, it’s been an interesting few weeks for MLM crypto exit-scams.
I’m not expecting any but if we hear anything further from Prance Gold, Binance, Huobi, Bittrex and/or Japanese authorities, I’ll publish any updates below.
Update 18th October 2020 – As per a video provided by Manabu Saito, it appears Prance Gold’s offices have been abandoned.