Bitalium Review: Trading ruse Ponzi scheme
Bitalium provides no verifiable information on its website about who owns or runs the company.
The broken English corporate bio for “Sam Walch” is hardly confidence inspiring.
In 2015 Sam Walch started cryptocurrency trading cooperative with a group of his fellow traders.
Further research lead me to an Adam’s Family episode a marketing video, purportedly featuring Bitalium CEO “Samuel D. Walch”.
No idea where Bitalium dug this guy up from but he’s a strong candidate for a Boris CEO.
Walch doesn’t have a digital footprint outside of recently published Bitalium marketing material. You can also see the actor’s eyes reading a script in the linked marketing video above.
Bitalium’s website domain (“bitalium.com”) was privately registered on February 10th, 2020.
As always, if an MLM company is not openly upfront about who is running or owns it, think long and hard about joining and/or handing over any money.
Bitalium’s Products
Bitalium has no retailable products or services, with affiliates only able to market Bitalium affiliate membership itself.
Bitalium’s Compensation Plan
Bitalium affiliates invest funds on the promise of an advertised return.
- Basic – invest $100 to $999 and receive a daily ROI for 180 days
- Premium – invest $1000 to $4999 and receive a daily ROI for 210 days
- Business – invest $5000 to $14,999 and receive a daily ROI for 240 days
- Platinum – invest $15,000 to $30,000 and receive a daily ROI for 270 days
Bitalium’s advertised return rate is up to 1.4% a day.
Commissions are paid on the recruitment of new Bitalium affiliate investors.
Residual Binary Commissions
A binary compensation structure places an affiliate at the top of a binary team, split into two sides (left and right):
The first level of the binary team houses two positions. The second level of the binary team is generated by splitting these first two positions into another two positions each (4 positions).
Subsequent levels of the binary team are generated as required, with each new level housing twice as many positions as the previous level.
Positions in the binary team are filled via direct and indirect recruitment of affiliates. Note there is no limit to how deep a binary team can grow.
Residual binary commission are paid as a percentage of 33% of funds invested on both sides of the binary team.
Residual binary commission rates are calculated based on how much a Bitalium affiliate has invested:
- Basic tier affiliates receive a 12% residual binary commission rate
- Premium tier affiliates receive a 15% residual binary commission rate
- Business tier affiliates receive an 18% residual binary commission rate
- Platinum tier affiliates receive a 21% residual binary commission rate
Bitalium’s compensation material doesn’t specify how frequently residual binary commissions are paid out.
Residual Unilevel Commissions
A unilevel compensation structure places an affiliate at the top of a unilevel team, with every personally recruited affiliate placed directly under them (level 1):
If any level 1 affiliates recruit new affiliates, they are placed on level 2 of the original affiliate’s unilevel team.
If any level 2 affiliates recruit new affiliates, they are placed on level 3 and so on and so forth down a theoretical infinite number of levels.
Bitalium caps payable unilevel team levels at five.
Residual unilevel commissions are paid out as a percentage of 33% of funds invested across these five levels as follows:
- level 1 (personally recruited affiliates) – 15%
- level 2 – 12%
- level 3 – 9%
- level 4 – 6%
- level 5 – 3%
Prizes
Bitalium rewards affiliates with prized for generating downline investment volume as follows:
- generate $25,000 in accumulated binary team volume and receive an iPhone 11 Pro Max
- generate $100,000 in accumulated binary team volume and receive a MacBook
- generate $200,000 in accumulated binary team volume and receive an “exotic trip”
- generate $500,000 in accumulated binary team volume and receive a Rolex Datejust 36 watch and access to Bitalium’s “office program”
- generate $2,000,000 in accumulated binary team volume and receive a “unique car fund” and “ambassador contract”
- generate $8,000,000 in accumulated binary team volume and receive a “premium car fund” and access to Bitalium’s “shareholding program”
- generate $15,000,000 in accumulated binary team volume and receive a “luxury villa on [sic] Bali worth $500,000”
Note that binary volume is only 33% of total funds invested. Bitalium don’t specify whether required volume is counted from one side of the binary team or both.
Bitalium’s Office Program pays partial rent costs for a rented office space.
The Ambassador Contract provides a “stable monthly salary”. And the Shareholding Program allows affiliates to ‘become shareholders of (Bitalium’s) exchange’.
No further details are provided.
Joining Bitalium
Bitalium affiliate membership is tied to a $100 to $30,000 initial investment.
How much an affiliate invests directly impacts their income potential through Bitalium’s compensation plan.
Conclusion
Bitalium is your typical trading bot Ponzi scheme.
The company represents it generates external revenue via day trading and scalping trading.
A trading bot they’ve named “Gilgamesh” will supposedly also be made available to affiliates at some point.
Bitalium provides no evidence of trading revenue being used to pay affiliate returns.
Instead of registering their passive investment opportunity with financial regulators and filing audited reports, Bitalium provides pseudo-compliance marketing slides like this:
Putting aside the fact that Bitalium didn’t exist until a few months ago, this is not a substitute for audited financial reports.
By failing to register their securities offering, Bitalium are committing securities fraud and operating illegally the world over.
The only reason MLM companies opt to commit securities fraud is because they’re operating as Ponzi schemes.
In Bitalium’s case it’s pretty obvious that all that’s happening on the back end is recycling of invested funds to pay daily returns.
Bitalium’s admin(s) take their cut and what’s left is used to fund the compensation plan.
In addition to running a Ponzi scheme, Bitalium’s commissions are tied to recruitment. This adds an a pyramid layer to the scheme.
Looking forward, Bitalium’s “project time line” references “Bitalium token” launching in Q3 2020. This is followed by ‘placement of Bitalium Token on various cryptocurrency wallets.’
This is known as the public exchange exit-scam. First affiliate returns and possibly commissions will be switched over to Bitalium Token.
Bitalium Token costs the company little to nothing to generate on demand, and will initially only exist within the company.
For some time Bitalium Token withdrawals will still be honored through an internal exchange.
When the time comes to exit-scam, Bitalium Token will be announced on one or more dodgy exchanges.
The token launches, the value pumps due to marketing hype, Bitalium’s owner(s) and top investors sell off what they can, and Bitalium Token’s price will dump.
Gullible investors are eventually left bagholding a worthless token they can’t do anything with.
By this time Bitalium’s owners have disappeared. And promoters who lead recruitment efforts company-wide will have moved onto their next scams.
The math behind Ponzi schemes guarantees the majority of investors will lose money. One way or another, Bitalium won’t play out any different.
Update 15th October 2020 – Bitalium has collapsed. As predicted, withdrawals are now only possible in Bitalium Token.
prnt.sc/son73e
That Russian native to the photo or the platform?
Also if your shoulders come up to your ears, you should probably see a doctor.
Another one! Same scammers who promote Cashfx and Kangot, now pitch this to their downlines!
Hangout has officially shut down, no more withdrawal for a week!
I give that video very high marks for entertainment value. According to the subtitles (which must also be the script he’s reading), at 1:15 he’s meant to say:
But what he actually says is:
We wants to be better than Beyonce.
Now for some serious stuff.
First: I don’t think he’s a Boris CEO, at least not in the sense of being purely a hired actor, because of this video, for Russians:
youtube.com/watch?v=XprGya47VQo
There, he fields questions supposedly put by people in a chat session and relayed to him by someone else, all in English. It’s stopped regularly for Russian translation. This doesn’t seem closely scripted to me, and coming from someone who’s involved.
Second: his accent in that longer video doesn’t sound Russian to me, unlike the guy who asks the questions. One very obvious thing: he knows how to make the “h” sound. I have a hunch where he might be from, but a way too tentative one to reveal.
With nothing much else to go on, I just typed “Bitalium” in Google. One of the first results I got was for this link:
speakerhub.com/speaker/dmitrii-savelev
But that turned out to be deleted. Luckily, Google’s cache still had it, it’s been deleted some time between May 12 and now. This Dmitrii Savelev describes himself as “top manager” of Bitalium, and for “BIO” has: “Bitalium – BECOME A SHAREHOLDER OF OUR CRYPTOCURRENCY EXCHANGE”.
That name gave me something more to search on. I found this:
pruffme.com/landing/u629849/index.html#/about
All about Bitalium, and all in Russian.
He also turns up as the one signing the following promo piece:
medium.com/@worldbusinesstrend/bitalium-cryptocurrency-exchange-we-are-changing-the-world-b5a44b5c5bb1
There, while he signs with the same spelling, he links to his Facebook page, which has his name in Cyrillic, and as a result in a slightly different spelling when directly transliterated:
facebook.com/dmitriy.savelyev.718
Searching a bit more on that variant lead me back to 2016, and this:
accupass.com/event/1606051451411725310282
This time, the spelling is yet another variant, Dmitriy Savelev, but he has the same picture as the facebook person.
The page is a sign-up one for something called CoinSpace (“One world, one currency” – hmm, sounds vaguely familiar), an MLM apparently based around yet another ERC-20 token, named S-Coin. That outfit was reviewed right here:
https://behindmlm.com/mlm-reviews/coinspace-review-s-coin-ponzi-points/
That’s as far as my trip down the rabbit hole has taken me so far. Whether this Dmitrii/iy Savelev/yev is a central figure in either this new thing or the past CoinSpace, or just an enthusiastic early affiliate who just embellished his status to “top manager”, I cannot tell from what little I’ve found so far. But at least he’s a solid Russian connection.
Boris CEOs don’t have to be Russian. I use the term to describe any actor CEO.
Just happens that more often than not they have Eastern Euro accents.
I know what’s meant by Boris CEO. I just think that, based on the longer video, this guy isn’t just a bad actor reading a script, which is certainly the impression one gets from the 3 minute presentation video on its own.
If he is just a hired actor, he’s one who’s made the part his own, and can improvise in character.
And since what little other information there is points to this being yet another Russian scam, I was rather surprised at him not having a standard Russian accent (at least to my ears).
An actor who only appears in videos anyone can make at home with a webcam, and never appears in shot with anyone else, can of course be hired from anywhere.
I pegged the accent as Swiss sounding (I’m no expert), or at least more Scandinavian than eastern European.
Guess we’ll have to see how things play out. Bitalium is obviously a Ponzi scheme but here we are more interested in the pageantry 😀
Well, he actually says he is from Switzerland in the video. Name and accent would match with him possibly being Swiss.
Savelev says about him “He is an old school business man, who thought of networking as a way to the future.”
Looking at possible people in Switzerland, there is one Samuel Cornelius Dominik Walch, in Menzingen, Zurich. He is involved in several businesses, and has a history of going in and out of businesses, some in liquidation.
This could be normal, but could also be signs of a “goalkeeper”, a sock puppet without collectable funds brought in to be the last owner before liquidation.
Congratulations, you’ve found him.
He has a LinkedIn profile: linkedin.com/in/sam-d-walch-2800b61a9/
The profile picture is definitely the person from the videos, and it doesn’t look like a fake new profile created to fit the Bitalium role, for one he doesn’t list Bitalium on there.
One other business he does list on there, 8consulting, conclusively links him to a whole host of other past and current corporate appointments (all in obscure small businesses).
A quick glance at his most recent appointment as a director, in a company called Stratsone AG, shows he must have a taste for businesses that have, to put it politely, somewhat unusual corporate histories, especially for a country like Switzerland, with a lot of oldfashioned, stable businesses.
I’ll give a brief summary of its corporate history, something tells me it probably isn’t untypical of the rest:
2013: A company called PETIFEX AG is formed. But this is actually just a continuation of an earlier company called DEANS AG. Its field of activity is retail trade in clothes, shoes, accessories, focused on fashionable, high-end brands.
November 2018: After four changes of address, the company changes its name to Medteclab AG, and its address for the fifth time. It also changes its field of business to providing software and IT services, IT consultancy, operating “digital platforms”, selling hardware and software components. Plus, it’s also an advertising agency.
March 2020: Another name change: Medteclab AG becomes STRATSONE AG (plus it changes address again). Samuel Walch becomes a director, with individual signing authority.
May 20, 2020: Another director resigns, possibly leaving Walch as sole director.
This STRATSONE AG has a website, stratsone.com, where it claims:
Well, if you consider existing as an IT company, with a sideline in advertising, since November 2018 a “long history and heritage”, that’s truthful.
The whole website just screams bogus company. The only products are supposed to be “STEM Kits” for use in schools, contents not listed but they’ll cost you between 8,000 and 15,000 Swiss francs, and there’s an app (or as they spell it, an APP), which “provides resources for STEM teaching organized and designed based on the student-centered approach”.
There are also “Subscription Plans”, monthly or yearly, with equally vaguely described contents.
The “Our Team” page also gives off that unmistakable “these people don’t exist (except as people whose pictures they found on the net somewhere)” vibe.
My favourite is the token black guy, “James Harvie, edtech content Manager”, who has this quote to share with us: “I write content to help make your counterpart more intelligent about you.”
Anyway, that’s another business Mr. Walch of Bitalium fame is a director of. Here’s some more content, including a nice graphical overview of his business career so far, to help make readers more intelligent about him:
business-monitor.ch/en/p/samuel-walch-6034326
I watched the latest zoom call with a bunch of guys and Samuel Walch.
At the end of the clip he pans the camera to a view outside of his office starting at 35:12
youtube.com/watch?v=x3qKkSP1RzU
On the window is the emblem and name of the company that operates from the the building he is doing the zoom call from ; Vierwald AG
vierwald.ch/en/
The address of Vierwald is:
Dorfplatz 16
9107 Urnäsch – Switzerland
Google maps shows a street view that corroborates that he panned his camera out of the window of Vierwald AG office looking onto the church across the road.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Dorfpl.+16,+9107+Urn%C3%A4sch,+Switzerland/@47.3168299,9.2825055,3a,29.2y,307.86h,104.14t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1swi3fXPBiFiGXDnOY7aG6RA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!4m13!1m7!3m6!1s0x479adf37b88ec031:0x272c4bcfc118a3e2!2sDorfpl.+16,+9107+Urn%C3%A4sch,+Switzerland!3b1!8m2!3d47.3169292!4d9.2822169!3m4!1s0x479adf37b88ec031:0x272c4bcfc118a3e2!8m2!3d47.3169292!4d9.2822169
shows the outside of the building. Note the standard of a lion on the wall and block-work fasçade matches the one shown in their f/b page.
facebook.com/Vierwald-AG-102832121175334/?ref=page_internal
In other words he is opperating out of the offices of Vierwald AG Escrow Services at Dorfplatz 16, 9107 Urnäsch – Switzerland
Great research Paul!
I’m quite happy to leave the Boris CEO deconstructions to y’all. They’re sure fun to read!
Congratulations, Paul (and what amazing endurance, to sit through an entire Zoom session like that, just to get to the good stuff at the end).
Belatedly, I’d like to offer this small correction:
That’s not a lion, that’s a bear rampant, from the arms of the Canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden. The Swiss tend to be big on displaying the arms and flags of their canton.
Vierwald AG’s description of themselves as an “Escrow service” on their Facebook page is a bit odd. In German, they only list three specific areas of services they offer. The first two are bookkeeping (per half hour – IOW, they cater to very small businesses), and dealing with the legal formalities of setting up a company.
The third one is the one probably involved here: a ‘Domizilservice’. Which means they provide a postal address in a low-tax Swiss canton for companies which don’t have a real presence there.
They offer it in 5 of such tax-haven cantons. (It’s not just foreigners with shell companies in Switzerland who use such a service, even Swiss companies from other cantons often resort to registering in another one for tax purposes.)
The old, traditional Swiss business of hosting letterbox companies used to consist only of mail forwarding. Nowadays, it’s often been expanded to a full virtual office service, sometimes including access to a few real office and conference rooms, which you can use when once in a while you want to pretend you have actual offices there.
That’s the most likely reason Walch is there for that Zoom call, rather than any more significant involvement of this Vierwald AG in the Bitalium thing.
2:28 minutes into this video youtube.com/watch?v=3zLIc4R5Jxc it is actualy well-known Poloniex exchange, at poloniex.com/exchange#usdt_btc
Hello Paul and Passby,
one mor Question to your interessting Investigation to Samuel Walch. I can find the Vierwald AG in Urnäsch. But I cant recognize a real relation between the clip where he pans the camera to a view outside of his office starting at 35:12 and the pictures I can find by google.
What makes you so shure that he is really in Urnäsch? Or is it, may be, another office of the Vierwald AG anywhere… Can you help me?
And just like that, Bitalium pulled an exit.
According to them, they were affected by covid 19. I wonder which player spent 30 evolution points to upgrade it into a computer virus.
#plagueInc
Wanna see how money, scammed with Bitalium will be spent in Dubai?
prnt.sc/11i9pz4
prnt.sc/11i9s7t
Piskun and Velichko gang is already pimping a new deal: Affluence. That Dubai lifestyle must be expensive.