Swag Review: Bitcoin mining Ponzi scheme
Swag also goes by just Swag Mining and Swag Network.
Swag’s parent company is presented as Swag Ou (aka Swag Corporate), which appears to be an Estonian shell company.
- Swag Mining (swagmining.com) – privately registered on Feb 26th 2020, Italian hosting
- Swag (swagyourlife.com) – first registered in 2019, domain registration currently private and last updated in June 2020, Italian hosting
- Swag Corporate (swag-corporate.com) – privately registered in June 2020, Italian hosting
Swag’s website defaults to Italian. This suggests whoever owns the company is at the very least of Italian origin, if not running the company out of Italy itself.
Supporting this is six of Swag’s current “best promoters of the month” being from Italy. The other two are from Spain.
As above, Swag’s company websites were registered through an Italian registrar and are hosted in Italy.
The only name featured on Swag’s websites is Gabriele Stampa (right).
Stampa is credited as
Co-Founder of the first and largest Italian mining farm and active member of the Scientific Board of Scrypta Fondation and Assocoin.
As per Stampa’s LinkedIn profile, he’s a Swag co-founder dating back to July 2019.
Stampa is based out of Florence in Italy, which is likely where the company is actually being operated from.
Supporting this is the domain registration for swagmining.com. Although the majority of registration details are “redacted for privacy”, we can see the registrant’s state and country is LI, IT.
This stands for the province of Livorno in Italy. Livorno is a province in the Tuscany region of Italy. Florence is the capital of Italy’s Tuscany region.
Based on his LinkedIn profile data, Gabriele Stampa appears to be your typical crypto bro.
Stampa cites involvement in a number of cryptocurrency projects, none which appear to have gone anywhere.
Read on for a full review of Swag’s MLM opportunity.
Swag’s Products
Swag has no retailable products or services, with affiliates only able to market Swag affiliate membership itself.
Swag’s Compensation Plan
Swag affiliates invest funds on the promise of advertised returns:
- Swag Pack 10 – invest €100 EUR and receive 2.5% a month
- Swag Pack 50 – invest €500 EUR and receive 3% a month
- Swag Pack 100 – invest €1000 EUR and receive 3.5% a month
- Swag Pack 250 – invest €2500 EUR and receive 4% a month
- Swag Pack 500 – invest €5000 EUR and receive 4.5% a month
- Swag Pack 1000 – invest €10,000 EUR and receive 5% a month
Note I’ve also seen the above returns advertised as “bimonthly returns”. I believe this refers to Swag affiliates are only able to withdraw every two months.
What I do know is that nothing is paid out the first month of investment. Return calculation begins from the second month.
Every two months Swag affiliates are required to pay an undisclosed fee to keep their investment rolling.
Referral Commissions
Swag affiliates earn a referral commission on fees paid by recruited affiliates.
Recruited affiliates appear to be tracked via a unilevel compensation structure, tracked down at unknown number of levels.
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.
I couldn’t find a specific payout percentage. An example I came across in a marketing presentation however stated that ten renewal fee payments on average equated to 0.0151 BTC in referral commissions.
From this we can surmise the average referral commission rate is 0.00151 BTC on each renewal fee paid.
Note that renewal fees are due every two months. As such referral commissions are also paid every two months.
Joining Swag
Swag affiliates are charged an annual fee.
This fee is not disclosed on any of Swag’s websites.
What I can confirm, based on Swag affiliate marketing presentations, is the more an affiliate spends when they sign up the higher their income potential:
Conclusion
Swag is your typical MLM crypto Ponzi scheme.
Affiliates invest funds on the promise of a monthly return, which is paid out of subsequently invested funds.
If Swag was actually generating ROI revenue via mining, there’d be no need for Estonian shell companies and corporate secrecy. Swag would also be registered with CONSOB, Italy’s SEC equivalent.
Swag is also not registered with the CNMV in Spain, meaning at a minimum it is committing securities fraud in its two primary investor markets.
As with all MLM Ponzi schemes, once affiliate recruitment dries up, so too will new investment.
This will starve Swag of ROI revenue, eventually prompting a collapse.
The math behind Ponzi schemes guarantees that when they collapse, the majority of participants lose money.
Three additional notes:
Firstly, Swag is currently being primarily promoted in Italy and Spain. If you’re approached about Swag outside of these countries, it’s likely recruitment has tanked and you’re being groomed as a bagholder.
Swag manages transactions from Swaggy, an app-based internal exchange. This is a central point of failure and can go down whenever Gabriele Stampa decided to exit-scam.
On that note, a crypto bro project in Stampa’s LinkedIn profile that caught my eye was TrueBitcoin.
Stampa claims he founded TrueBitcoin in July 2020.
Fast forward seven months later and, according to TrueBitcoin’s website, it isn’t launching for another 22 days.
According to TrueBitcoin’s website;
We are developing a new cryptocurrency minted with care and in rare metals integrating a strong component of Hi-Tech systems.
It will be connected to the web and to the blockchain from which it will acquire unprecedented qualities and new levels of control and security.
We have reinvented bitcoin and you can use it like any other currency.
It will be like having a treasure in your pocket.
The first cryptocurrency in history that through the Blockchain will be able to assume exactly the value of the bitcoins it represents.
A shitcoin that represents a specific amount of bitcoin. So why wouldn’t you use actual bitcoin?
Because this is peak “BUH MUH BLOCKCHAIN!”, that’s why.
Surprise surprise;
The actual purpose of TrueBitcoin is so Stampa can stop paying out bitcoin.
Worthless TrueBitcoin will be dumped on Swag investors instead, allowing Stampa a clean exit when the time comes.
You know how this ends.
TrueBitcoin is not a new coin representing BTC. It is a real metal coin linked to a NFT (not fungible token) that can be used to access the real BTC (not a new coin).
Basically is like an hardware wallet for collectors. The TrueBitcoin has a NFC chip on it and a QR code written using a laser etcher. There’s a patent on this technology.
The tokenization (NFT technology) is from Scrypta Blockchain that is a PoS blockchain used also for notarization purposes.
Regarding Stampa, he is committed into different projects, the mining farms for examples are located in Russia and are a real business.
In Italy they sell the services as a renting of computational power, and from legal point of view, here, this is not like selling securities, even if the reward is BTC. No problem currently, from legal point of view. And also the rewards can be declared as income for tax purposes.
In the past Stampa participated also to other mining projects, for example Bitminer Factory, one of the biggest Italian farms that now is delocalized in Russia (like the SWAG farm). You can see here a video from RAI, the italian national television:
youtube.com/watch?v=HEu956CKGSc&ab_channel=AmicidelForexedelBitcoin
And here a press conference in the house of representatives, with Gabriele Stampa explaining the mining activity.
youtube.com/watch?v=J-IpaK7vrjw&t=1706s&ab_channel=ClaudioGustavoArtusio
The SWAG business is to leverage the network marketing to increase the business activity. Most of the mining ASICS in the Farm are already working, when a client buy a rental pack the computational power is switched to that client and they will receive the reward directly on their wallet from the mining pool.
Obviously the cost of the pack/rental is greater than the wholesale cost of the devices, but you have a managed service with energy consumption included.
The network marketing permits you to have a free rental service. The business is officially and legally registered in Italy.
The parent mining farm is offering also services for big players in the mining industry: minerwatt.com/
Maybe the MLM model applied on ASIC renting and the marketing applied by the sponsors is questionable, but the project, the technology and the mining farms are real and legit.
Barf. Even with your explanation you’re still describing a shitcoin used to represent BTC. Another crypto solution without a problem (just get BTC directly).
If you’re talking about Swag then yes it is a problem. CONSOB has already cracked down on several MLM crypto companies committing securities fraud.
Every time you mention Russia all I’m seeing is “crypto scammer flees to Russia to avoid regulators”.
If that were the case Swag wouldn’t be committing securities fraud. If you want to prove mining revenue is being used to pay Swag affiliates, provide legally required audited financial reports.
Hi Oz, I think you have old or not correct information about SWAG.
The pack you describe are not present at this time on the website, you have 2 different way to join the company, as customer or promoter.
Customer simply can buy part of ASIC to mine bitcoin, they have their ASIC stored in 2 mining farm in Russia that one of my personal friends visited personally.
The 2 mining farm are mining farm from Bitfury and Bitriver.
If you join as a promoter you can earn a percentage, based on your qualification level, on the sales you made to other customers or other promoters.
The founders of the company were involved in a company named Infostrada in the past, that was a big telephone company that was sold to a bigger group.
However, due to the law in Italy, is not so easy run a SCAM company in our country, is one of the most rigid country for MLM and also if the company is based in Estonia, something pretty common for Italians Entrepeneurs, they could not easily manage all the work from Italy.
And would also be stupid run a company like this in Europe if this is a SCAM.
I started investing in SWAG few months ago and I can say that you don’t receive an income based on how much money you invested, but you buy a portion of an ASIC that produce an amount of BTC based on difficulty and power of the machine.
Maybe you have old information but I can’t find what you describe in the proposition that SWAG made today to his customers.
This review was accurate at the time of publication.
I went to visit Swag Mining’s website and it’s in maintenance mode. A Ponzi scheme hiding its investment plans is still a Ponzi scheme.
Unless you can provide audited financial reports confirming mining revenue is being used to pay withdrawals, the only verifiable source of revenue entering Swag is new investment.
There was no retail detailed on the Swag Mining website at time of publication.
Laws don’t stop scammers from running scams. They are used to hold them accountable.
Well I don’t know how works in Estonia, but I think that, like any other european country, is possible to pay to have information about the company including financial report.
I will check if it’s possible to have it 😉
Swag is being run from Italy. Whatever shell company bullshit they’ve filed in Estonia doesn’t matter.
Estonia does deregister scammers who set up shell companies from time to time, but overall there’s no meaningful regulation going on there.
That’s why crypto scammers keep incorporating shell companies there.
Well OZ, is not that simple, I also had a company in Estonia.
Many entrepreneur, in Italy, are opening company in Estonia or in UK because tax are lower than in Italy.
Italy is one of the country with the higher tax in the world.
You can run a company in Italy and found it in another country.
If you are a digital Entrepreneur you have no reason to open a company in Italy.
I live in Spain now, and I have a company in UK, this not mean that my company is a SCAM.
And also if you say that the law doesn’t stop scammer I can grant you that an istitution like CONSOB could easily advise all the customers that SWAG does not have any autorization to serve what it claim to sell. 🙂
No it is that simple. The only reason MLM scammers incorporate in scam-friendly jursidictions instead of their country of operation is because it’s a scam.
If it’s an MLM company and you’re offering unregistered securities like Swag, yes it does.
CONSOB regulates securities in Italy and neither Swag, any of the attached shell companies or Gabriele Stampa are registered to offer securities in Italy, or anywhere else in the world.
They could and regularly do. The reality is though, based on Alexa website traffic estimates, Swag is dead.
Dead Ponzi schemes don’t trip regulatory warnings. Sorry for your loss.
Furthermore, a lack of regulatory warnings does not translate into legitimacy. Swag is a Ponzi scheme first and foremost because of its business model, as detailed in the review.
On top of that you have securities fraud, which lends itself to MLM companies operating as Ponzi schemes.
Thank you OZ, but I’m earning, is not this the point, I’m just trying to discuss with you because I appreciate the work you do and I just want to understand more on things that I personally find wrong in what you write, just this.
I saw your review, noted that what you write is not what we buy when we start working with SWAG and I wanted to notify you the differences, just this. 🙂
Swag is committing securities fraud because it’s a Ponzi scheme.
Swag tried to hide its Swag Mining Ponzi by disabling the Swag Mining website after this review was published.
There’s nothing to correct.