With the MLM niche being the cesspool that it is, you’ll typically have a hard time getting to the bottom of who’s behind what.
“Decentralized” has become a term scamming admins hide behind so as not to reveal themselves.
NRGY token, another smart-contract Ponzi scheme, is no different.
While I can’t say who set NRGY up (anyone who tells you nobody created NRGY is lying), two prominent names I’ve seen attached to it are Vitaly Dubinin, Peter Ohanyan and Duane Noble.
These three serial-scammers with a long history of Ponzi promotion. They are currently out there pitching NRGY to anyone who’ll listen.
Vitaliy Dubinin was last seen promoting the flopped Daisy AI Ponzi scheme.
In marketing presentations he appears in Ohanyan refers to NRGY in the possessive.
If Ohanyan isn’t in bed with whoever’s running NRGY he’s otherwise obviously pretty high up.
Prior to NRGY Ohanyan was promoting EvoRich, the Skyway Ponzi spinoff.
Duane Noble was last seen promoting Brank. Whether that’s going anywhere who knows, but here we are.
NRGY is being marketed as if nobody has ever heard of “decentralized finance”, or DeFi for short.
With respect to the MLM industry, DeFi is a deeper descent down the crypto shitfuckery rabbit hole.
The NRGY investment scheme has been set up on “fleek.co”:
Fleek bill themselves as the “new internet”.
Fleek is all you need to build websites and apps on the new Open Web: permissionless, trustless, censorship resistant, and free of centralized gatekeepers. Welcome to the new internet.
In other words, the kind of place scams like NRGY are welcome.
NRGY’s MLM opportunity is going by the inconspicuous name “Community Builder”.
You sign up, connect your crypto wallet to the scheme and are then able to invest in NRGY tokens.
NRGY solicits investment into NRGY via ethereum and USD Coin. The scammers behind NRGY set the internal token price, which as I write this is well into pump territory.
Once invested in, NRGY tokens are parked with the company (staked). The more NRGY tokens an affiliate parks the higher their payout of the weekly pool share.
The weekly pool share promises a “targeted 4%” ROI of the total number of parked NRGY tokens.
In order to get new investors on board, NRGY is pitching 30%+ over its first few weeks. We’re currently in week three.
30%, 4%, 300%, none of that of course matters. Returns are paid in NRGY tokens, which cost NRGY’s admin nothing to create.
Referral commissions on parked NRGY tokens are paid down two levels of recruitment (unilevel):
- 15% on level 1
- 10% on level 2
As with the weekly return, referral commissions are also paid in NRGY tokens.
In order to cash out, NRGY token affiliates have to put in a USDC withdrawal request. NRGY collects a 7.5% withdrawal fee on each request.
So here’s how this plays out:
Having launched three weeks ago, NRGY’s admins and early adopters, your Vitaliy Dubinins, Peter Ohanyans, Duane Nobles etc., scooped up their pre-pump NRGY tokens for peanuts (<$2).
Shill shill shill, pump the token price and cash out invested crypto. You and everyone else is left holding the bag.
On the regulatory side of things an MLM crypto Ponzi scheme is no different than a fiat Ponzi scheme. Wire fraud, securities fraud, FTC Act violations, it all applies.
If someone is pitching you on NRGY and touting iNcReDiBlE gAiNz, be aware of the fact that anything in NRGY is unrealized.
There’s only a finite amount of USDC to cash out (math is math, even in crypto).
Once that’s drained, and it eventually will be, it’s over.
Update 13th March 2021 – Within an hour or so of this review going live, Duane Noble showed up in the comments below to aggressively defend NRGY.
This seemed kind of odd, as Duane seemed to take NRGY being correctly identified as a Ponzi scheme personally.
Anyway, courtesy of Chris Hawk Jones, mystery solved.
Alan Friedland (right), subject of a current CFTC fraud lawsuit, is behind NRGY.
Chris Hawk Jones claims Duane Noble is “working real close” with Friedland.
Update 8th February 2022 – NRGY as an MLM opportunity is being rebooted as BuilderDefi.