Meta Whale has received a securities fraud warning from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).

ASIC added Meta Whale to its Investor Alert List on November 28th, 2025.

[Meta Whale] may be offering or advertising, or may have offered or advertised, financial services to Australian consumers.

It does not hold an Australian financial services licence or Australian credit licence from ASIC, and is not authorised by a licensee.

Offering unregistered financial services to Australian consumers constitutes securities fraud.

Meta Whale is an MLM crypto Ponzi run by wanted fugitive Vladimir “Lado” Okhotnikov (right).

Launched in mid 2025, Meta Whale marks the eighth reboot of Okhotnikov’s long-running Forsage Ponzi scheme.

Okhotnikov was indicted in the US in early 2023. The SEC has also filed parallel civil fraud charges.

Okhotnikov had been evading US authorities in Georgia. In March 2024 a Georgian Forsage criminal investigation saw Okhotnikov sentenced in absentia to ten years in prison.

By that stage Okhotnikov had fled to Dubai, where he remains today.

In addition to Australia;

Meta Whale operates from the domain “meta-whale.com”. As of November 2025, SimilarWeb was tracking ~2100 monthly Meta Whale website visits.

Over the same period of time the majority of Meta Whale website traffic originated from Pakistan (58%) and India (42%).