Pegasus collapses, wallet drained & withdrawals disabled
The Pegasus Ponzi scheme has collapsed.
As of 24-36 hours ago, affiliates who attempt to withdraw are receiving a bitcoin fee error message.
The error message appears to be hard-coded, with the amount shown static across different affiliate accounts and attempted withdrawal amounts.
As I understand it, Pegasus affiliates are still able to invest new funds into the scheme.
While they made their getaway, Pegasus’ admins initially told investors the error message was due to a “payment processor issue”.
It happened 3 times before, and each time it was between 5-6 hours.
As the hours dragged on, Pegasus came up with a new “upgrades” excuse.
It’s a problem between switching funds from the funding wallet to the payments wallet when we want to add money to the wallet for payouts we have a funding and payout address.
We don’t like to keep a lot of money in the payments wallet in case of hacking or some other event, so when paying wallet is empty we just transfer from one wallet to another.
The wallet we use for that messaged up something in the upgrade, and for that reason last few hours we weren’t able to transfer money from funding to payment wallet.
That’s why error shows how much is left money in payment wallet.
This suggests 0.00002255 BTC is all that’s left in Pegasus’ withdrawal wallet post exit-scam collapse.
Pegasus was an MLM crypto Ponzi pitching 1.5% a day, capped at 300%.
Due to the use of ePayCore, a Russian financial services provider, Pegasus is believed to be run by Russian scammers.
The Central Bank of Russia issued a Pegasus pyramid fraud warning on April 11th, 2022.
Pegasus’ collapse follows a decline in website traffic between May and June, with only a mior recovery across July.
For a Ponzi scheme reliant on new investor funds to pay withdrawals, why Pegasus collapsed should be obvious.
Website traffic stats from SimilarWeb reveal Pegasus investor recruitment has collapsed across the board. The exception to this is Germany, which will likely account for the majority of new Pegasus investors getting screwed.
Total Pegasus victim numbers and losses are unknown.