Pop Max Ponzi collapses, Nivex’s Luma Protocol reboot
The Pop Max Ponzi scheme has collapsed.
Victims of the scheme are now being funneled into a “Luma Protocol” reboot.
Pop Max surfaced earlier this year as a Dubai-based “staking” model MLM crypto Ponzi.
Pop Max solicited investment in tether (USDT). Returns were paid via a “staking” model in PUSD token, which was then had to be converted to pop social token (PPT) in order to cash out.
A few weeks ago Pop Max disabled the conversion of PUSD to PPT, effectively disabling ROI withdrawals. Almost immediately after, Luma Protocol was announced.
Luma Protocol is hosted on the subdomain “dapp.lumaprotocol.io”. The root .IO domain, access disabled, was privately registered on August 29th, 2025.
Luma Protocol presents a convoluted investment scheme tied to mining of POP tokens.
POP tokens are withdrawn through Nivex, a dodgy crypto exchange run by scammers hiding in Dubai.
Two names we can attach to Nivex are co-founders Simon Hardy (aka Szymon Pietraszczyk) and Becky Choi (aka Becky Cai).
Both Hardy and Cai are serial fraudsters who’ve promoted multiple MLM Ponzi schemes (DEFI Money Club, Meta Force, GPBots, SolaRoad etc.).
Luma Protocol is presented as a joint development between Nivex and Pop Max.
There’s more than a good chance Hardy and Cai are behind the entire scheme. That said, they’re not working alone. Other Chinese scammers have been presented as Pop Max co-founders.
In July 2025, serial promoter of MLM crypto Ponzis Sal Khan interviewed Pop Max co-founder Nicholas Wan, aka Ruicheng Wan (万睿诚), at Nivex’s offices in Dubai.
Getting back to Luma protocol, it exists because new suckers have dried up. Pop Max is now in the “milk as much new money out of existing investors” phase.
Part of that is trapping as much money in the system, hence the endless token launches. Token conversion serves as manipulatable hoops for investors to jump through when they try to withdraw.
Depending on how long Luma Protocol takes to collapse, it’s likely Nivex (Hardy and Cai) will launch additional scams to further milk Pop Max victims.
LOL Yep Here comes the real owners.
They have scammed many people in kenya.
Simon hardy and Becky cai have scammed billions of dollars, mostly from Chinese victims. They destroyed many innocent lives , some victims even took their own lives.
They are involved in a large-scale international investment and money laundering scheme operating under the Nivex Exchange and luma protocol which has defrauded victims across multiple countries.