Beurax emphasizes why ASIC registration is meaningless
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.
People generally are not aware how easy it is to register a business name. They think that because someone files a couple of forms that the business has to be legit.
Re the beurax fiasco, even when I replied to some “supporters” who were impressed with the asic registration, that the generic business address in Canberra proved nothing about Beurax having a physical presence in Australia I was howled down.
Sadly, greed clouds judgement!
Oh yeah, the office that never was. I recall a few dumbasses swearing on Beurax’s legitimacy because they had an office in Can-bear-rah.
Shoutout to this chucklefuck, claiming his uncle visited the Russians in their non-existent Australian office.
Even bigger joke than ASIC is UK’s Companies House.
Everything can fabricated there with great ease and total impunity.
Let me give you a great example I recently found.
Russian scammers behind Wiseling set up this sham insurance company in UK called Parker & Lawson Group (website still up: parker-lawson.com), and claimed it has insuranced all Wiseling investments.
“No worries, hand out your money, it’s totally safe because everything has been insuranced up to half billion pounds — go check yourselves Parker & Lawson is wealthy company.”
The funny thing is that when go and check the underlying entity PARKER&LAWSON FINANCE GROUP LTD (find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/12706525), it does indeed seem to have impressive share capital of half billion pounds. This likely have fooled many.
But it’s only because UK is such a pirate & nihilist jurisidiction that there aren’t even elementary checks on the information provided to the Companies House. Everything goes!
I doubt there would be any troubles establishing “BoJo’s penis enlargement fund Ltd” with Jimmy Savile as the CEO & with share capital of 666 666 666 pounds at the Companies House.
Speaking of attempts at legitimacy by registration, I remember awhile back on another thread one hapless victim/scammer (hard to tell which is which sometimes) tried to convince us all that the scamming company couldn’t possibly be shady because they had registered “in Washington.”
It wasn’t until later I realized the guy probably got Washington the state mixed up with Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital. Washington state is in the northwest corner of the U.S., and Washington, D.C. is near the east coast, wedged between Virginia and Maryland.
The easy name mix-up is probably why the scam company registered in Washington in the first place.
Washington state is a lovely place; Microsoft and Starbucks are headquartered there. But it is a continent away from the U.S. capital.
I think phone scammers try to pull the same trick. I got a call yesterday from a robot voice that said I had to talk to an “agent” immediately or they were going to kick my door down and haul me away, or something.
Obvious scam is obvious, but the spoofed number had a 253 area code and the ID just said “Washington.” 253 is the area code for the metro area around Seattle, Washington (state).
True. A friend of mine registered a company as a test, and put Donald Duck as CEO.. ‘Electronicaly verified’.
UK companies house registration is worthless.