“Digital gold vaults” investment fraud warning from ASIC
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has issued an investment fraud warning, pertaining to “digital gold vaults”.
As per ASIC’s September 11th warning;
ASIC is aware of unlicensed entities promoting suspicious investment opportunities in digital gold vaults.
These unlicensed entities are luring consumers by purporting to offer passive income and other benefits, such as payments, in return for recruiting or referring new investors.
The entities target trusted relationship-based networks, such as families and friends, and use online articles and social media posts and groups, such as Instagram and Facebook to provide details about the investment.
Consumers invest by obtaining the rights to use a digital gold vault with a certain storage capacity and for a specified period of time.
Other investors will then use the digital vault to store their virtual gold, and this allegedly generates a passive return for the initial consumer.
This fits the former business model of Auratus Gold, a GSPartners spinoff targeting Australians.
It can be difficult to verify whether the digital gold vaults in fact exist because the entities offering the vaults are typically based overseas.
It is possible that the passive returns generated may actually be funds from new investors, resulting in some schemes potentially being ponzi schemes.
While it’s odd ASIC didn’t mention Auratus Gold or suspected owner Josip Heit (right) by name, ASIC did issue an Auratus Gold securities fraud warning last month.
As far as I’m aware ASIC hasn’t taken action against any other company using a “digital gold vault” business model. Again, it’s odd Auratus Gold wasn’t referenced by name in ASIC’s September 11th warning.
In any event, Auratus Gold’s initial “digital gold vault” investment scheme collapsed in June 2024.
Auratus Gold’s second fraudulent investment scheme sees consumers pitched on passive returns through Zai Cards and “gold points”.
This is essentially a repacking of GSPartners’ “metacertificates” fraudulent investment scheme.
GSPartners, parent company GSB Group and owner Josip Heit recently settled securities fraud allegations with four US state regulators.
The North American Securities Administrators Association notes GSPartners claimed to have solicited $1 billion in investment from “over 800,000 investors”.
I haven’t seen any other products out there pushing vaults so not sure why they didn’t mention Auratus.
It may be that they only just caught on to the vaults from earlier in the year and don’t know enough about the ZAI cards yet to issue a similar warning.
At least it’s something. Funnily enough I saw a promoter last night with screenshots of their loyalty points returns and it still references “your vaulted gold”.
Vaulted gold and then digital vaulted gold and even worse digital vaulted gold that expires after X vault cycles… people must be off their rockers to buy into this crap; or blinded by greed and thus the ideal victim of con artists.
Melbourne bullion dealers, Bullion Now, also reported on this on their weekly livestream last Friday.