EmpiresX began restricting withdrawals in early October.

Withdrawals were then completely disabled in mid October, and have remained so since.

In an EmpiresX corporate update sent out mid December, co-founders Emerson Pires and Flavio Goncalves threatened legal action against victims and top promoters.

Also, rather than just admit their Ponzi scheme ran out of money, Pires and Goncalves offered up a boatload of unverifiable withdrawal excuses.

EmpiresX’s December 15th update is an audio recording styled “Update From The Founders Of The Company”.

In previous EmpiresX updates Pires and Goncalves have appeared on video.

The audio recording features Pires and Goncalves reading off a script. Whether the two are in the same location is unclear.

In addition to threatening to sue investors, Pires and Goncalves address EmpiresX’s ongoing withdrawal issues.

To keep thing simple I’ve separated verbatim quoting of issues covered in the update below.

Threats of legal action

Pires: Because things were said and filed against the company, the company is now forced to spend its time and resources to protect itself.

All throughout, the company acted in good faith, yet accusations and claims were made against EmpiresX.

EmpiresX believes the claims and accusations are unfounded and untrue, and (are) intended with malice.

Therefore to protect everyone, the firm is pursuing legal action against those that intended to cause harm, or make false claims about the company, which is defamation.

Seeing as the only people complaining about EmpiresX would be disgruntled investors, this is taken as a threat against the affiliate-base.

Shut up or we’ll come after you.

Pires: Similar to our comment about abuse, EmpiresX has become aware that certain actors were taking funds from sources in their network, offering a return on their investment, and then planning to offer a lesser return than what would be made from EmpiresX.

This violates multiple rules and regulations, and the firm knows these actors and is taking legal action against those actors.

Scammers scamming scammers. You hate to see it.

For what it’s worth, I’m not aware of EmpiresX naming any “actors” or initiating legal proceedings.

EmpiresX Withdrawal Delays

Pires: To better serve you, investments were made to diversify into new markets that lowers risk.

These new markets include precious stones, precious metals and real-estate.

To complete these transactions, partnerships were formed with experts in Brazil, Namibia, Angola, Dubai and Portugal.

Because of these new partnerships, there’s a worldwide reach that reduces risks and provides better opportunities.

To form these partnerships, it took a lot of time and networking. That has resulted in an absence of updates.

This is the first I’m hearing of EmpiresX pretending to engage in anything but bot trading.

No evidence of Pires’ “new revenue” claims has been provided.

Also, due to (the) new and innovative nature of digital currency transactions, the company had manual processes that resulted in delays to the company’s expectations.

Therefore (in) an effort to streamline operations, EmpiresX engaged with seasoned professionals who broke contract terms and acted maliciously and spread operational trade secrets.

This ultimately hurt the company and some of this led to additional harm to the company.

Goncalves: One of the harms created was the exposure of the new IT company that led to countless phone calls to the new IT development company, which they considered harassment.

Before, during or after the new system development, it is very critical to maintain confidentiality to protect the company from malice, and the client database from being distorted.

This breach of contract resulted in non-performance and ultimately caused more problems and delays.

Whether Goncalves is referencing his Tecnologia2u Brazilian development company or another company is unclear.

No evidence of Goncalves IT company claims has been provided.

Goncalves: Another harm was Coinbase payment platform.

To clarify, Coinbase Commerce, which is the one used for receiving and sending payments, is a different platform from Coinbase.

And after the Coinbase outage, bitcoin network become unavailable and is still unavailable till this day.

This has resulted in crypto funds being untransferrable [sic], due to Coinbase error with blockchain, that is causing network unavailable issue.

All other cryptocurrency are available, such as ethereum and USDT, through the same platform. And this error is only affecting the bitcoin network.

Unfortunately, the majority of the payments to the company were made in bitcoin. And this issue has restrained the company from converting to other cryptos, withdrawing or processing payments.

Persual of Coinbase’s incident history reveals no bitcoin problems logged throughout December. Notwithstanding EmpiresX withdrawals have been disabled since mid October.

Pires: Due to unforeseen challenges, the company is facing distractions from its core business.

Nonetheless, the company is doing everything within its control to ensure that payments will be made.

EmpiresX will not stop trying to resolve these problems.

As of January 7th, EmpiresX withdrawals remain disabled. Emerson Pires and Flavio Goncalves are MIA.

Closing EmpiresX investor accounts

Goncalves: EmpiresX is closing account(s) where the capital received was restored.

And over the coming weeks EmpiresX will close all accounts that has [sic] requested capital withdraw for the third time, or violated company policy.

In trying to sound like a lawyer, Goncalves complicates three simple statements:

  1. EmpiresX is involuntarily closing any affiliate investor account who has received more than they invested;
  2. EmpiresX is involuntarily closing any affiliate investor account that has placed three withdrawals; and
  3. EmpiresX is involuntarily closing additional affiliate investor accounts under the guise of company policy violations.

SEC Rules (???)

Goncalves: Exchanges or valid received for access to EmpiresX’s business activities will be restored per SEC rule over any withdraws and liquidation values.

Put simply, whatever capital was given to EmpiresX, EmpiresX will or may have already provided transaction, restoring the capital back to the source received from.

I can state with confidence that there are no “SEC rules” preventing EmpiresX from processing withdrawals.

EmpiresX is a Ponzi scheme, they’ve already violated US securities law. Not processing withdrawals under the guise of not wanting to further commit securities violations is pseudo-compliance.

Goncalves: Furthermore the company has sufficiently satisfied (and?) meets its net capital requirements.

Goncalves stops there, seemingly convinced he’s made some sort of point. I have no idea what that point is (or what he’s even saying).

Looking Forward…

Remarkably, even with withdrawals disabled for three months, website traffic to EmpiresX continues to grow.

Our last update on EmpiresX was published on December 1st. At the time Alexa’s top EmpiresX website traffic sources were Australia (22%), South Africa (19%) and the US (15%).

Recruitment in those countries appears to have collapsed. EmpiresX is now being promoted heavily in Tanzania (66%).

South Africa has dropped to 16% and Vietnam has replaced the US at 6%.