BitRobot collapses, hackers out exit-scamming admin?
The BitRobot Ponzi scheme has collapsed.
In a departure from the usual exit-scam though, hackers are claiming to have taken over BitRobot’s website.
According to a lengthy message published on BitRobot’s website, “a group of experienced French-speaking hackers” have taken it over.
Our group of hackers is made up of very normal people that you meet in everyday life. In the shadows, we are on the hunt for Internet scams.
After a long investigation of several weeks, we have all the elements at our disposal to prove that Bit Robot is a genuine scam for its customers. You, the customers, are in reality the victims.
I’m not necessarily buying that but it is what it is.
According to the hackers, Belgian national Arnaud Racine is the anonymous admin behind BitRobot.
In the comments below BehindMLM’s BitRobot review, Racine (right) was outed in August 2020 (comment #2).
Another reader claimed Racine wasn’t BitRobot’s owner, but instead was the owner of BitRobot’s non-existent trading bots.
According to the French hackers, Racine claimed to be a “leader” within BitRobot.
This is totally wrong. First of all, he is more of a specialist in Ponzi schemes. And regarding Bit Robot, he was the real ruler.
The hackers dismiss Laurent Barthelemy as CEO, claiming Racine planted him as a friend to aid in deception.
Arnaud used his “friend” Laurent to have someone take all the wrongs for him.
Arnaud wanted to get by as a simple “leader” who is not part of the company.
Voice messages between Racine and Barthelemy are provided as evidence of Racine “dictating” operations.
Barthelemy also didn’t have access to BitRobot’s financials, which were allegedly under Racine’s name.
Unfortunately the messages are in French and I can’t verify them.
In one voice message, an exit-scam plan in which mispaid funds are paid is laid out by Racine;
Laurent refers to the bonuses of the pre-launch challenge which took place from July 15 to September 15, 2020.
Laurent expressed his opinion: according to him, the bonuses should not have been paid in the form of funds in the “deposit wallet”.
Overwhelming response from Arnaud at the end of the extract: “When we go SCAMMER them , we will tell them it’s because of that” followed by a laugh.
An operational timeline of a year to a year and a half is also discussed. Along with plans to create “pseudo partnerships” with a “famous card” merchant.
As alleged by the hackers, Racine implemented his exit-scam on or around December 22nd or 23rd. This is when Racine cleaned out over $300,000 of cryptocurrency held in BitRobot’s affiliate investment accounts.
There was also a massive embezzlement on the night of January 6-7. Unfortunately, our crook took a little more care at this point, since we have no clear record.
All we can say is that the traceability of funds has been blurred by means of a “mixer” which allows to “launder” its cryptocurrencies.
Racine is has purportedly gone into hiding. His communications with investors became increasingly sporadic throughout December.
Based on website traffic estimates from Alexa, BitRobot’s victims are primarily from Venezuela, Russia and Argentina.
Update 25th April 2023 – Belgian authorities have named Laurent Myriam Claude Barthelemy as BitRobot’s owner.
Barthelemy was arrested in Brazil on April 18th.
Update 27th April 2023 – Arnaud Racine has been arrested in Belgium.
Update 4th April 2024 – Brazil has approved Laurent Barthelemy’s extradition to Belgium.
I don’t believe it also, I’m one of those who use bitrobot before, I am 100% sure there is no hacker, its a ponzi scheme.
Thanks admin for the article, I relieved those old gullible days of mine which I cannot determine if its a scam or not.
Keep it up
I thought hackers just took over the website domain? Personally I’d go with it being an inside job.
Hackers aren’t just running around looking for Ponzi schemes to avenge.
As I understand it whoever took over the domain is claiming Racine exit-scammed. Obvs BitRobot was a Ponzi scheme.
Smells like an inside job to me, also. I find it interesting that these anonymous “hackers” took pains to represent Barthelemy as an innocent victim in all this. Mayhaps Barthelemy is playing the role of these hackers as a way to paint Racine as the true villain. Racine certainly is A villain, but is he THE villain? Hmm…
First observation: nothing about that supposedly “hacked” site felt right to me.
When I decided to see if I could find some more information about this Arnaud Racine guy the authors so hamfistedly try to paint as the baddy here, I found that a Zoom call by him (a monologue actually), where he defends himself, has popped up on Youtube: youtube.com/watch?v=YnQxX2JapFU
I’ll try and summarize his, often very emotional, defense, as far as I can make it out from one quick listen (it’s not always easy to follow):
1. He’s been framed, set up as the patsy by the owners of Bit Robot, who have disappeared with the money, and put up that fake “hacked” website.
2. They’ve also spread his personal information far and wide, and he’s received lots of threats from disgruntled investors, including physical threats from people who came to his home (in Belgium).
He is now in hiding, under police protection. Federal police, he’d gone to his local police first, but they thought it serious enough to call in the federal level. He mentions the officer in charge by name.
He also says he has an appointment with the Procureur du Roi, the chief prosecutor for the region, to talk about the whole matter (so not only the threats, but the Bit Robot exit scam). If that’s true, it is indeed being taken seriously.
3. The facts of his real level of involvement are: he has his own little company, Incrementum, which had trading bots.
Renaud Barthélémy, who was a friend of his, set up Bit Robot, to market access to these bots through an MLM. He took part in this MLM as an affiliate, and a “leader”. So he basically was the tech guy, and an affiliate, but never involved in management.
4. The very short supposed bits of voice messages of his on the “hacked” website have been edited together out of out-of-context snippets, plus a laughter sound following one that’s not even him, with fake explanations about their supposed context added.
He also explains the original context for some bits. My initial reaction was already that those partial messages were so short and contextless one couldn’t deduce anything from them (even if one assumed the voices were those of the people they were atrributed to), and his explanations for their original, entirely innocuous, contexts make perfect sense to me.
5. The Russian guy, who tells some unclear tale about how bad Arnaud Racine is, in English, is an actor, not somebody he ever met.
That’s about all I could gather.
Near the end he starts going into screenshots of various exchanges he’s been sent by others, but I can’t really follow that.
I think he tries to establish that the people who were running Bit Robot were already building up to this exit scam in the last months of 2020, without him knowing anything about it. (He does say at the beginning he only heard about it all when people started calling him, having seen the “hacked” website.)
On balance, I think Arnaud Racine’s Zoom monologue, while unclear in parts, makes a lot more sense than the story on the very unconvincing “hacked” page.
I’d be inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt in this case. That’s not saying I believe he was unaware that it was a Ponzi or anything, but I do think the real exit scammers have tried to frame him.
Three thoughts:
1. If Racine wasn’t running the show but was in the Ponzi scheme, why let scammers use his name? We had people on here claiming he was BitRobot’s owner last August.
2. Why hasn’t Racine outed the owners? Or is this *groan* another Russian Ponzi?
3. If Racine’s bots aren’t bullshit why doesn’t he just run them himself till Jeff Bezos?
“FACTS” and “trading bots” in the same sentence ?
Yeah…….nah.
He can stop right there with his “explanation”.
I thought it went without saying that trading bots generating massive profits are a scam. Obviously, however he came by these bots (if they exist at all), he knew they weren’t making the kind of money Bit Robot were claiming, or he wouldn’t have needed to rent them out to other people in the first place.
But I was just trying to relay what he claims was his actual involvement with this obvious Ponzi, rather than the version on the “hacked” website, according to which he owned and ran the whole show all along, but had it fronted by a fake CEO.
And just generally, that version, where he was just the tech guy (as in: the one guy with just enough technical knowledge to provide the appearance that there was some kind of tech going on), and then used as a patsy in the exit scam, appears to me like it could be more truthful than the tale on the “hacked” site. It doesn’t mean he wasn’t an accomplice to the Ponzi while it lasted.
As an analogy: say Madoff had wanted to exit-scam a couple of years before the collapse came, had made all the remaining money disappear (at times, he had billions in his account), and blamed it all on the two programmers who’d created the bespoke software for the IBM AS/400 on which the whole scheme depended. Those two guys of course were accomplices in his crimes, and their fingerprints would undeniably be found all over that software. But they weren’t running the show, never controlled any money directly, and financially, they were relatively minor beneficiaries.
This Racine guy could be in somewhat similar situation.
Of course, it could all be a very elaborate double bluff, with all the mutual accusations of theft and deception carefully planned, to create maximum confusion.
One thing I think is quite clear: there are only two sides. The fake “hackers” were created to be able to aim accusations at Racine while pretending they come from a third party, rather than the other people from Bit Robot.
I’ll try and have a second listen to the Zoom monologue later on, to see if I can add something relevant to Oz’s questions 1 and 2 (I pretty much disregarded bits where he mentions names, because I haven’t got a clue who these people are).
Arnaud Racine is an IMPOSTOR, it’s not the first time for him.
He had a lot of problem in Belgium with many others leaders.
And for sure, he had taken the wallet of bit robots.
This guy is a manipulator with everyone including his wife.
Hackers or not, Racine created all the structure of BitRobot. He is creator of the project, main administrator and main promoter.
Day of the scam, he was saying tons of bullshit to save his ass in his online conference.
Oz, maybe you remember some articles you wrote in the past, you said “Admin is french or from belgium” because you noted some bad translations in the english language on the website… I need to find which ones but I can tell you you have at least 2 old reviews (2016 to 2018), Racine was owner.
I am pretty sure karma will take care of this guy, a big manipulator, shame on him!