Thread by @NFTethics

1/ In this thread we will disclose the identity of one of the (currently) most (in)famous NFT influencers. But before we do that, we first explain our (philosophical) justifications and provide some important disclaimers.

2/ In real life, certain identifying data (name, (tax) ID, bank accounts, …) can be compared to blockchain addresses. Based on (combinations of) that data everyone is able to trace our historical actions and it allows scrutiny over our personal and professional lives.

3/ Decentralization has various advantages, but also specific disadvantages for which the NFT space currently does not have a solution. Anonymous people have less of an incentive (or even no incentive at all) to act morally/ethically and to take accountability for their actions.

4/ It is therefore no surprise that some of the big(gest) anonymous influencers in this space have behaved in ways that they would never have behaved or been able to behave when they would not be anonymous.

5/ In Web2 the big influencers benefit from everything they do know about us. In Web3, the big (anonymous) influencers benefit from everything we do not know about them. But they both (try to) influence our behavior for profit and capitalize on it for their own benefit.

6/ We want to emphasize that we don’t want to cast a shadow over the NFT space itself, which provides a much-needed pillar in the battle against (further) centralization and will be instrumental in continuing to gradually evolve into the future metaverse.

7/ This space consists of many (com)passionate communities, creative creators, committed contributors, compulsive collectors, combined with colossal quantities of crypto capital, and as such is and remains a force to be reckoned with.

8/ We also don’t want any project that the person in question has been investing in to be negatively affected, and we urge these projects to distance themselves from this individual and to clarify their relationship with him. Some of them have already done that in the past weeks.

9/ Indicating possible criminal acts and/or fraud prevention constitute a legitimate interest or should be regarded as a legitimate interest to dox someone and we believe that is the case for this particular individual as this thread will show.

10/ In this thread we make a connection between the digital and physical reality, and allow anyone to make a judgement themselves regarding this individual. Actions always speak louder than words, whether they are digital or physical.

11/ The person in question is Beanie (Twitter handle: beaniemaxi) and we have confirmed his identity via different independent sources. Any evidence provided is from publicly available data and can be verified, in the true spirit of Web3.

12/ For those that only believe things when they hear it (most won't have ever seen him, but will recognize his voice), we provide hereby a short part of a video in which you can hear his voice. He is not visible, because we cut it in such a way that no one is recognizable.

13/ Beanie describes himself in one of his online profiles attached to his real name as “absent of a strong work ethic” and as someone “who takes pride in the fact that he has never had a real job in his life”. So how was he able to become so “successful”?

14/ Before answering that question, we first explain how we were able to discover his identity. We have to go back to a project called Monkey Bet DAO by “Invariant Labs” (IL) that Beanie says he invested a "very small" amount in. That could not be further from the truth.

15/ People in the Monkey Bet DAO Discord already had noticed that the name RGT (Royal Gaming Technology) was mentioned in the T&Cs of various MBD websites and the Company Registration number and slot designs were identical to the ones from RGT.

16/ Many OG holders asking critical questions about the project were banned from the Discord. And when Beanie was asked whether he knew RGT, he denied ever having heard of it (see screenshots). But, in actual fact, it turns out he is the owner of RGT.

17/ The so called “big lie” is a tactic that Beanie frequently uses: "a lie so colossal that no one would believe that someone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". Anyone who doubted his words, was actively banned by him and his team.

18/ When ChimpBet was launched, the publicly announced director of ChimpBet was directly identified as a Sales Director of RGT and people also noticed a resemblance with another RGT project called CryptoBet.com.

19/ There is a CryptoBet video on YouTube that features a person that has exactly the same voice as the MBD project lead Owlman (Twitter handle: Owlman1of1), and during one of the MB Twitter Spaces Beanie mentioned his first name, which did indeed match.

20/ According to his LinkedIn profile, Owlman is IRL the General Manager of RGT, and even though Beanie has mentioned multiple times that he is a dev, he is not.

21/ When typing in the real name of Owlman into OS, an ENS domain showed up attached to an account (0x08ac0605d7dca266735e9686dd90285b9e4952f0) with an interesting history. It was the deployer of CBET, a “scam token”, associated with a variety of “scam projects”, incl. TokenPay.

22/ TokenPay was transferred to RGT, and it was easy to find out that the same person behind CBET and TokenPay was also the person behind RGT. In fact, before he used the name Beanie, he used the name EC on Discord, which corresponds to one of his many TokenPay twitter handles.

23/ On different forums, TrustPilot, and Reddit, there are many complaints about CryptoBet. In particular it is frequently mentioned that once you win a jackpot in their casinos, they flag your account as “high risk” (without explanation) and you are not able to withdraw anything

24/ When we checked the status of Corporation Registration Number associated with RGT, it shows that registration was discontinued on 15 April 2020, even though the casinos have been operational after that and still are to this date.

25/ It was probably meant to create the illusion that CryptoBet or ChimpBet have a proper gambling license, because when we checked the status, it seems to be a sub-license of another company, of which there is no trace. The address is associated with another (gambling) company.

26/ The company RGT itself is registered in Panama, with an officer of an offshore entity who is also mentioned in the Panama papers. That will become a recurrent pattern: Beanie generally always hides behind someone else (or a proxy).

27/ It is ironic that Beanie often mentions his dislike for low-effort copy pastas, when we have to conclude that Monkey Bet DAO and Baboon Bet (1000 ETH mint in total) was nothing more than just that: a copy pasta of RGT’s earlier products.

28/ Even though Beanie always mentions “community first”, none of the 7.5% OS royalties on Monkey Bet, Baboon Bet or Pit Boss went to the DAO members or was invested in any way in the project at all.

29/ It is now clear why all the mint money went to Owlman and Beanie and why they all the time tried to push for an affiliate casino system. They didn’t only make money on the mint and royalties, but also on the casinos themselves.

30/ They recently had a giveaway but the wallets that they mentioned as being the winners of that giveaway were made-up wallet addresses – they don’t exist on the blockchain.

31/ There was a Facebook group and website by unsatisfied customers of RGT. When Beanie understood that his identity was linked to RGT and that his name was mentioned on these websites, they paid these people off to take the websites down. This happened in the last two weeks.

32/ So was this an isolated incident that Beanie was involved in? When diving into his past, this was only the tip of the iceberg and there is a pattern during his very dubious “professional career”. We briefly provide a chronological overview.

33/ The first traces of Beanie online were when he was active in the TV pirating business more than 20 years ago. As the owner of dimedealer.com, he was selling devices designed for the surreptitious interception of satellite communications.

34/ Even then he received so many complaints for scamming on forums, that people were warning for him. We show a screenshot of a forum thread with 14 pages of complaints, and one from another forum with a specific warning about him personally.

35/ After many complaints and suspected DOS attacks against competitor websites, Beanie apparently came under investigation by Canadian and US enforcement authorities and DimeDealer.com was discontinued.

36/ Beanie would go on with his dubious practices as the owner (AKA “HU King”) of DecoderNews.com and co-owner of SatSmart.tv, and started to move their hosting servers from his native country Canada to central America, where he currently still resides.

37/ Both websites were however sued by DirecTV (also known as Dave, after the VP and Head of Signal Security David Baylor) and the legal court case documents can still be found online, see (1) casetext.com/case/directv-43, (2) pdf.textfiles.com/legalthreats/p… and (3) pdf.textfiles.com/legalthreats/f…

38/ The case was however dismissed because Beanie allegedly made a deal and sold out all his thousands of paid customers, incl. admins/mods of his forum by handing over all their personal data to the authorities. They all faced criminal charges and were fined.

39/ This was not unexpected, as it was not uncommon for him to threaten unsatisfied customers that complained to release their personal details (knowing that they would get into trouble). An example of someone that was banned from his forum and Beanie releasing his personal data:

40/ Even though Beanie has often mentioned that he never had any social online presence, this was certainly not true. He used to have a Twitter account with over 12k followers, a Facebook account and a LinkedIn profile.

41/ He became active on Twitter trying to provide his analysis on mid cap stocks. His Twitter bio had the slogan “Buy Grief, Sell Hype”. What he is doing with NFTs now, he more or less used to do with stocks. Not everyone always agreed with his analyses...

42/ Under his own name associated with his company “Equitable Research”, he also wrote for financial media such as The Street and Seeking Alpha, and then realized money could be made with cryptos/ICOs.

43/ One of the largest and most prominent crypto scams he has been involved in is the case of TokenPay (TPAY), whereby he pretended again to be an investor, but really was suspected to be acting as the CEO behind the screens. He wrote the WP foreword, see: static.coinpaprika.com/storage/cdn/wh…

44/ With an illegal ICO they raised around 2000 Bitcoin (estimated to be between $22 and $34 million dollars) and almost none of the investors saw that money back. The TPAY coin value shows a similar curve as the one from $BGLD. The value dropped from $10.88 USD to $0.05.

45/ Internal pump and dump schemes and very shady business deals and partnerships were suspected to have enabled a large percentage of funds to be siphoned off for personal gain while reducing the BTC value of the TPAY coin for its holders.

46/ A TokenPay entity in Switzerland was created (as usual behind a proxy) and stakes were bought into a real estate bank that didn’t make any profits. They also acquired 7% of a public company stock called Naked Brands (which has not been sold yet).

47/ Also a TokenPay entity in Hong Kong was created (again behind a proxy) that was used to dump 2.5 million TPAY coins on the market in exchange for hundreds of valuable domain names that went to personal accounts. The value of the TPAY coin would never recover after this.

48/ The coins they used to buy these domains were those that were refunded after being illegally sold to US investors.

49/ Beanie has admitted being a domain name investor, which is confirmed by doing a reverse WHOIS check on his real name. It is obvious in whose possession those valuable domain names are or were in case they have been resold. The domains were listed on TokenDomains.com.

50/ Other partnerships and ventures were created to make it look as if there was substance behind the venture, e.g. TokenSuisse.com (website now suspended), esports.io (domain for sale), TokenGaming.com (for sale), privacycoins.com (for sale).

51/ Beanie was already known to be using many different aliases in order to influence, deceive and manipulate people during his TV piracy business, and that pattern seems to have continued during his time with TokenPay. But certain apps show the name based on your phone number...

52/ This should not come as a surprise as he recently admitted using 16 Twitter handles and provided proof of that...

53/ The investment vehicle that he used for TokenPay was Huntingdon Investment Corp, registered on the British Virgin Islands on the same address as TokenPay. The address is also included in the Panama papers. The whitepaper mentions the how critical this "partner" was.

54/ The domain name for Huntingdon Investment was only registered just before the ICO launch, so it only seems to be used to provide credibility to the claim that Beanie was only an “investor” instead of the mastermind behind it. The domain is currently available to register...

55/ According to the website of Huntingdon (using the Wayback Machine which has proven to be still a very valuable tool), he was also an investor in InvestFeed, a website that is currently not accessible anymore as it is investigated by The Financial Commission.

56/ TPAY and TokenPay Suisse AG were transferred to RGT, and many people involved in the "TPAY scam" were already well aware of that. The latest Medium post by TokenPay (medium.com/@TokenPay) is that new updates can be followed via RGT and so we have come full circle.

57/ When Beanie recently started re-using an old Twitter account for his new fund at GM Capital, he clearly did not seem to have been aware of that fact that this account was suggesting followers to follow the Twitter accounts of all his previous "scams". BLASTcx was another one.

58/ One common trait of a "successful" scammer is to call out other scams aggressively and as frequently as possible as it builds and increases a lot of trust. This is a tactic that Beanie is well aware of and frequently uses.

59/ It is ironic that Beanie promotes web3, but in his behavior shows all the signs of the web2 world by censoring, banning and blocking people who voice legitimate concerns over any of his projects.

60/ He proclaims to like transparency but tries to remain as non-transparent as possible by using large numbers of different aliases, Twitter accounts, (anonymous) wallets, offshore proxies and front men to hide behind and manipulate people.

61/ In general it is ironic that many of these big influencers argue against those malicious big centralized corporations, but they have become themselves the centralized entities (VCs, Big Tech) that they purport to replace.

62/ In the early days of the Larva Labs discord Channel, Beanie has told many things which we have now confirmed to be true. He revealed that he owned a real licensed casino company that was run by Owlman.

63/ He also revealed to have run the largest hacker IRC, that he moved out of Canada more than 22 years ago for tax reasons, and that he has 30 years of professional trolling.

64/ He also mentioned that the Canada Revenue Agency are “retards” and “much too dumb” for crypto. The reason why he still has his Canadian citizenship is because they would otherwise audit him.

65/ We still have far and far more information that we have not (yet) disclosed, but we think we have presented enough evidence to allow people to make up their own judgement as to the kind of person that Beanie (really) is.

66/ We have tried to keep this thread as civilized and neutral as possible, just objectively reporting our observations and presenting the evidence in a responsible way by purposely not including any photos or other sensitive data such as address details.

67/ We urge people with large influence in the NFT space, particularly those who do this anonymously, to behave ethically and remind them that if they don’t, they will be found (out). Beanie surely agrees given that he ran an online reputation management company

68/ We also urge all relevant authorities and jurisdictions to investigate this individual and his accomplices in their involvement in a large number of very dubious and potentially fraudulent projects and, if applicable, to hold them accountable to the full extent of the law.

69/ Instead of competing with each other, we hope the NFT space is able to come up with new and innovative self-regulating mechanisms to create an ethical blockchain and ecosystem that doesn’t reward perverse incentives.

70/ If there is one community able to come up with a way to defy the traditional economic system and its laws, and find a solution for the natural tendency of resources to behave according to the Pareto principle, it is the NFT community.