The Shao Bank Ponzi scheme has collapsed.

Earlier this week Shao Bank’s website was pulled offline. At time of publication Shao Bank’s domain remains inaccessible.

Instead of just being honest about collapsing however, ShaoBank is playing domain musical chairs in an attempt to further defraud consumers.

Since disabling its primary domain Shao Bank has burned through at least four additional domains;

  1. shaobank.online, privately registered on January 5th, 2024;
  2. shaobank.biz, privately registered on May 7th, 2024;
  3. shao.finance, privately registered on May 6th, 2024; and
  4. shao.to, privately registered on May 8th, 2024

Presently Shao Bank’s fifth reboot is up on “shao-global.cc”, privately registered through a Bahamas registrar on May 8th, 2024.

Preceding Shao Bank’s collapse were two notable events.

First was the trotting out of a “hackers!” exit-scam. This was posted to Shao Bank’s official Telegram group a few days ago;

We are reaching out to provide an important update and to address concerns regarding recent events that have impacted our service.

On Monday, we faced a sophisticated cyber attack from an unidentified hacker group. The primary objecting of this combined assault was to extort our institution through blackmail.

Despite the attackers’ efforts our securities measures were largely successful in thwarting the attack. However, the hackers were able to temporarily disrupt three of our domains.

We have taken all neccessary precautions and are actively consulting with cybersecurity experts to strengthen defenses and prevent future incidents.

This is of course all bullshit and just part of Shao Bank’s collapse.

Second to note was Shao Bank’s introduction of its own KiCoin shit token (KCN).

In the lead up to its collapse, Shao Bank was running bonus investment promotions that only paid out in KCN. KCN of course being completely worthless outside of Shao Bank.

The introduction of a shit token just before an MLM Ponzi collapses is a classic exit-scam strategy (victims are left bagholding worthless tokens).

Shao Bank emerged in 2023 as an MLM crypto Ponzi hidden behind a fake bank bonds ruse.

The fraudulent investment scheme is believed to be run by eastern European scammers. Supporting this is Shao Bank’s official FaceBook page being managed from Lithuania.

On the regulatory front, Shao Bank caught the attention of Hong Kong and Russia. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority in particular confirmed Shao Bank was committing banking fraud.

SimilarWeb tracking of Shao Bank’s defunct domain shows a decline in website traffic until April 2024. In April there was an uptick in Shao Bank website traffic, mostly attributable to recruitment activity in Italy and Argentina.

If I had to guess whoever was running the show figured this uptick was the best time to exit-scam and disappear. Whoever is left at Shao Bank wants to keep the gravy train running and so we have domain musical chairs.

Pending further action by authorities, total Shao Bank victim numbers and how much they’ve collectively lost remains unknown.

 

Update 11th May 2024 – Shao Bank’s fifth “shao-global.cc” domain is now also offline.