Auratus Gold’s fraudulent investment scheme collapses
The latest iteration of GSB Gold Standard Corporation’s ongoing series of fraudulent investment schemes has collapsed.
As per a June 20th edit to Auratus Gold’s website terms and conditions;
Only gold purchased in The Auratus Standard online shop can be placed in the TAS Vaults
This product is no longer for sale ( as of 22/06/2024)
Auratus Gold’s fraudulent investment scheme saw investors, mostly GSPartners promoters and victims from Australia, invest up to €10,000 euros in internally generated TAS Gold tokens.
The tokens were then parked in a virtual “TAS Vault”. This was done on the promise of periodic “vault cycle” passive returns.
TAS Vault returns were paid in TAS Gold, which investors could theoretically cash out until Auratus Gold inevitably collapsed.
Auratus Gold represented invested euros were tied to physical gold. Due to a lack of regulatory compliance however, the only verifiable source of revenue entering Auratus Gold was new investment.
Shell companies attached to Auratus Gold included:
- Helvetic Digital Finance AG (Switzerland)
- TAS Helvetic Gold Trading LLC (Dubai)
- DX and One Trust LTD (Bulgaria)
- MTX Finance LLC (Montana, US) and
- Link Genius Portal LLC (Dubai)
Auratus Gold’s website terms and conditions suggests investor fund were, in part or otherwise, laundered through third-party processor Zai.
ZAI Card:
1. ZAI Card is a promotional product only
2. ZAI Card allows TAS Card holders increased storage capacity of physical gold and TGPs loyalty points.
Zai markets itself as a “payment collection platform” based out of Australia. As of April 2023, the company is headed up by CEO Shamus Hodgson.
Since launching a few months ago, Auratus Gold already caught the attention of the Texas State Securities Board. The financial regulator named Auratus Gold as part of a wider effort by GSB Gold Standard Corporation effort to defraud consumers.
GSB Gold Standard Corporation is a German company owned by Josip Heit (right).
Through GSB, Heit has launched several fraudulent investment schemes dating back to 2021.
- GSPartners – originally a Ponzi built around G999 token, rebooted as a “meta certificates” Ponzi that collapsed in December 2023 following over a dozen regulatory fraud warnings
- Swiss Valorem Bank – attempted and quickly abandoned rebranding of GSPartners in mid 2023
- GSPro – short-lived failed rebranding of GSPartners after December 2023 collapse
- Billionico – originally a suspected backdoor for US and Canadian GSPartners investors, now some weird membership club promoted in secret
- Auratus Gold – GSPartners reboot with “meta certificates” switched out for “TAS Vault”
Auratus Gold’s collapse follows the recent arrest of a GSPartners promoter in South Africa, termination of GSB’s official YouTube channel and scrubbing of GSPartners’ social media accounts.
Josip Heit is believed to be holed up in Dubai. He hasn’t made any public appearances or communications since mid 2023.
The outcome of multiple US federal investigations into GSB and Heit remain pending.
Time to accept defeat Josip and cronies.
Can’t believe those pesky YouTubers in South Africa caused all of this through their defamation and loss of income.
After noticing that the chairman of Billionico was using the title of ‘Baron’, I did a quick search on his name as I know that there are some legitimate Barons out there, but I’m also aware that there are many Europeans who use titles to which they aren’t entitled to use.
I’ve noticed that Baron is a particularly favoured one which was the only reason I questioned it, which them sent me down several deep rabbit holes.
I was interested as I have a friend who is involved in this company, and I’m extremely concerned for her. In fact, I almost invested several thousand dollars in this gold company as I trust my friend and it was I who asked her about investing in gold when she mentioned that she was involved with this company & sent me a photo of herself in Dubai.
She’s been telling me to wait until the Gold cards became available as it meant that I could start with EU 350, then I could use it like a bank card & just top it up to buy small amounts of gold if or when I had spare cash, & I could withdraw from it just like my bank card, instead of waiting to have a minimum amount as is usually the way with Term Deposits.
I honestly don’t believe that she’d ever intentionally point me in the wrong direction when it comes to investing my money and she knows that I believe that gold is the best investment to make at the moment.
I was particularly keen to invest in gold with this company because I could just purchase small amounts & they’d be added together with small amounts of other gold purchasers’ investments & when they reached a certain value, & that once they became a large amount, the owner of the company then put in around what I think I worked out was around 20% of the value & I’d receive a ‘residual’ every 10 days or so.
I was just happy at being able to buy gold by adding smaller amounts of money along the way, after the initial minimum investment as I’m not confident in the security of the USD, nor am I confident in AUD as I believe that Australia has its wagon hitched too closely to the USA & to the USD.
All this said, I’m really concerned for my friend as not only does she have tens of thousands of dollars ‘invested’ with these people, but she’s also recently purchased what I think are virtual businesses from them. She’s a ‘real believer’ in them & has even been over to Dubai to meet with these thieves & scoundrels.
After reading the amounts of dollars involved just here in Australia, are there any Federal laws such as ‘grand theft’ & ‘larceny’, that allow our govt. to freeze the bank accounts of any of the senior Australian people involved in this scam, &/or bring criminal charges against them? Surely they can’t be allowed to just get away with this?!
I have never seen Australian authorities bring forward wire fraud and money laundering charges with respect to MLM related fraud. I could be wrong but I just assumed these laws don’t exist.
At best ASIC might take you to court but they only seem to take on one MLM related fraud case every decade or so.
Also if your friend is going off to Dubai she knows what she’s doing. You have to scam a certain number of people to get the Dubai “crime capital of the world” invite.
It’s a bit sad that other countries with active regulation have put a stop to GSB/GSPartners/Auratus etc. But Australians are still being recruited into it like lambs to the slaughter.
From Karatbars to Billionico does anyone know where all of our money has gone to? Ever since Nitsa Nakos claimed in the beginning there was 100 million dollars raised for a bank the only thing I have seen since are lavish lifestyles flaunted on social media.
Is there any insider on here that can break down what purchases have been made with investors’ money over these past 4+ years? Is their anyway we can figure out this money trail? Surely there are some on here that know something.
Same as any MLM Ponzi scheme. The money you invested was stolen by the people running the scam and a few top promoters.
If you want a specific balance sheet you’ll have to ask their accountants.
The authorities aren’t contacting their accountants?
Anyone know who their accountants are? What ever happened to Marvin Steinberg? I thought he was supposed to be behind the demise?
Not sure if you could actually call this collapsed, sounds like a pivot if anything. Apparently they’re just moving to the card now over the vault.
Check out this totally legitmate news article on a totally legimate and real news site:
morningchronicle.co.uk/Economy/335356-auratus-introduces-a-new-gold-standard-for-individuals-and-global-merchants-through-its-global-tas-card-business.html
If they are that’s not going to be public information till the indictments drop or arrests are made.
If TAS Vault isn’t paying returns per cycles (which Auratus Gold’s updated website T&Cs states), then that short-lived Ponzi has in fact collapsed.
The card is what? You invest in Ponzi tokens and then “spend” them on a dodgy debit card (the unsuspecting issuing merchant never sees the tokens and will have no idea GSB is attached because shell companies are used)?
I don’t get how that’s worth marketing without the attached fraudulent investment scheme. You can walk into any bank and get a debit card.
Lol. We just pretending GSB, Karatbars and GSPartners wasn’t a thing now?
@MDNZ
Claude ai says:
From talking to a current customer/victim sounds like it is still showing returns for those who had already signed up for the vault but it’ll expire after a certain number of ‘cycles’ and depends on how much ‘gold’ gets put in.
Doesn’t really make any sense but it’s not like it did in the first place anyway…
@MDNZ
So Auratus Gold is paying numbers on a screen.
“Gold put in” = new investment. If they just cut off new investment then RIP cycles no?
(This is all academic as we know if there’s no new investment there’s nothing to steal but pulling apart the marketing makes the next BS they come up with all the more funnier.)
@Anna
I possibly should’ve made my sarcasm about the legitimacy of the site more apparent there.
I can’t believe anyone would think it’s real, especially with the flashing/glowing name banner.
I spent a while digging at it yesterday out of curiosity:
All of the other articles appear to be directly lifted from another site federating AFP news and then attributed to some random named author who doesn’t exist.
Interestingly if you change the translation up at the top right all of the AFP articles seem to have translations to other languages but the Auratus one doesn’t.
The fake ‘advertisements’ are just the company logo and a link to the home page for that company.
It’s currently behind Cloudflare which makes it hard to see the source, but looking into the history it looks like it was created in Germany by a German web developer back in 2013 and was hosted there until it shutdown for a while in 2019.
Looks like it came online in its current iteration in March this year.
Yeah it’s BS all the way down, but people are still falling into it unfortunately.
Hi there, my name is Maryanne, and I am the Marketing Manager at Zai, the company mentioned in this article. It’s a great article, and an incredible service you are doing with your website.
We believe there has been a bit of a misunderstanding – we do not have any business association with Auratus Gold. We think the mixup is because they have their own product called the ‘Zai Card’ (See link here: auratus.gold/shop), which shares the same name as our company.
We do not offer a product named ‘Zai Card’. I’ve been told that “Zai” means prosperous or fortunate, which might explain its popularity in the finance industry.
We are willing to provide further comments or clarifications in the hope that our company’s name is removed from Auratus Gold in the article. Thank you.
Hi Maryanne, if Auratus Gold is obtaining the cards through Zai it won’t be in the company’s name. It’ll be through a series of shell companies. E.g. Blue widgets inc., attached to green widgets inc., attached to yellow widgets inc. etc.
Hong Kong or Singapore shell companies would be primary suspects if I had to guess.
If you can confirm, to the best of your accounting dept’s ability, that Auratus Gold isn’t issuing Zai Cards through Zai I’ll update the article. Thanks.
Auratus Gold is targeting Australians with a Zai Card and Zai represents itself to be an Australian company, so you can see the concern.