The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has emerged as a regulator of choice for scammers.
Despite being a financial regulator, ASIC operates at a snail’s pace and has no actual power of offshore scammers who feed it bogus details.
Nowhere is this better on display then with the recently collapsed Beurax Ponzi scheme.
Beurax was a Russian Ponzi scheme. We know this because the company hired Russian actors to front the company.
These promos, shot in rented offices in Russia, are known as “Boris CEO videos”. They have become a calling card for Russian scammers.
In an attempt to appear legitimate, the scammers behind Beurax created Beurax Corporation Pty Ltd.
Beurax Corporate Pty Ltd was an Australian company incorporated with bogus details.
Beurax Corporation Pty Ltd. was registered with ASIC on August 21st, 2020.
No attempt was made to verify the information Beurax provided. And Beurax of course never filed any financial reports, despite being registered with ASIC for almost a year.
The only reason Beurax registered a shell company with ASIC, was to obtain a registration certificate to use as marketing for their Ponzi scheme.
Two days after its executives were outed as Russian actors, Beurax’s scammers pulled the plug.
Sixteen days later, ASIC belatedly advised consumers “do not transfer funds or further funds to Beurax”.
Bear in mind Beurax’s website went offline on March 9th. There hasn’t been any way to invest for over a week.
Revealing why they are pointing out the obvious; ASIC states;
ASIC has received reports predominantly from overseas investors who invested with Beurax via beurax.com, who are now unable to withdraw their investments.
Beurax has stopped communicating with those investors.
This of course we already know. And ASIC dropping the ball is nothing new.
The take-aways from ASIC’s Beurax warning however is that ASIC registration is meaningless, and that they can’t do anything against offshore scammers.
Beurax is a registered company. Company registration does not mean a business is viable or that a business model is sound.
ASIC is unable to assist in recovering your funds. Contact your financial institution to see if they can assist in tracing payments made.
That’s the bottom-line.
I’ve been dismissing ASIC registrations as valid due-diligence for a few years.
As far as I’m aware the only MLM Ponzi ASIC ever investigated was BitConnect, and only because the accused was based in Australia.
Like the UK, as long as ASIC allows offshore scammers to register with bogus details for peanuts, the duping of consumers with false representations of legitimacy will continue.
Going forward I’ll continue to flag ASIC registration as a red flag and be linking back to this article.