The Guardian Australia published an investigation into a crypto scheme scam called HyperVerse a few months ago. The fund raised millions of dollars from small investors using celebrity endorsements and then collapsed; Blockchain Global collapsed in 2021 with US$58 million in debt, but this time a rather classic scammer is on its tail: the CEO who promoted this scheme does not appear to be a real person The CEO who promoted the scheme does not appear to be a real person.

HyperVerse was promoted by Blockchain Global co-founders Sam Lee and Ryan Shue, both of whom have been referred to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission: Lee denies that HyperVerse is a scam and disputes being the founder Shue has said nothing about it. However, the company's CEO is a man named Steven Rhys Lewis, who appeared at the scheme's launch in late 2021, along with video messages of support for HyperVerse from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and actor Chuck Norris.

According to HyperVerse, Stephen Rhys Lewis graduated from the University of Leeds, received a master's degree from Cambridge University, sold his company to Adobe, and started an IT start-up company. He was also described by Goldman Sachs (described by Matt Taibbi as "the great blood-sucking squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly pushing a funnel of blood at anything that smells like gold" before being headhunted by HyperVerse.

Lewis is featured in the HyperVerse launch video. Think about it, is he a Cambridge graduate who runs Goldman Sachs, or is he an actor who doesn't quite know what he signed up for?

The problem is... None of these highly respected institutions had ever heard of Stephen Rhys Lewis, and according to the Guardian's follow-up research, neither the university, nor the named firm, nor Companies House (the UK-based registry of companies) had any record of anyone by that name. Adobe did not have a record of anyone by that name. Adobe has never acquired a company owned by a person of this name, and Goldman Sachs has no record of him. His only Internet presence is all linked to Hyperverse, including an X account set up a month before Hyperverse.

Of the two (alleged) company founders, Shue is largely inactive, and Lee seems to be involved in all sorts of misdeeds; HyperVerse is linked to his other crypto scheme called HyperFund, and Lee has an incredibly cynical "We Are linked to several other crypto investment platforms, including All Satoshi. It is named after Satoshi Nakamoto, the founder of Bitcoin, whose ingenious idea of empowering dwarfs to avoid centralized banking is a far cry from the Wild West, where cryptocurrencies are riddled with scam artists and thieves.

A "cease and desist order" was issued in California against Lee, who controlled the "We Are All Satoshi" scam, for being a "fraudulent pyramid and Ponzi scheme."

Last year, Lee met briefly with hyper investors after the collapse was revealed and encouraged them to "rebuild your trees." As for what happened after that, no one will even need to ask.

There are no numbers on the amount of money people may have lost through blockchain global. This in itself tells us something fundamental about crypto.

And it is perhaps appropriate that Stephen Reese Lewis almost disappears in this article: after all, he most likely never existed in the first place. We may all be satoshi in spirit, but the natural world is rather red in tooth and claw.