Description

In March 2024, I received a message on WhatsApp inviting me to join a stock market investment group. I have no idea where they got my number from; I assume it was from any website where I once made an inquiry, provided my contact information, and turned out to be a fraudulent site that captures your data for malicious purposes. The WhatsApp message I received was from an investment group calling itself L102 Carl Investment Alliance, led by a man named Carl Roberts. I naively stayed in the group just out of curiosity to see what information it offered, and then I followed some of their investment recommendations, but it turned out to be a fraudulent organization. By the time I discovered it was a scam, the WhatsApp group had 120 members, and these are the phone numbers of the Administrators of the group as well as its leaders: • Group Administrators: Christian: 231-634-2752 / Christopher: 516-875-7275 / Desmond: 860-321-4675 / Humphrey: 323-677-6083. • Carl Roberts (leader of the organization): 970-370-6754, 605-605-4540. • Maria Pola (Carl Roberts’ assistant): 321-366-8036, 334-461-3506, 609-808-5104. • Linus Customer Service Representative: 803-573-9217, 313-763-2709, 601-751-7511. Carl Roberts promoted himself as the leader of a financial advisory group called Skyline Alliance, which specialized in stock market, helping clients invest in stocks they analyzed in detail and believed had high growth potential. Their sales pitch was that they would only profit after a trial period in which people would have the chance to witness how effective their recommendations were. This proposal seemed attractive to me because, in theory, he was knowledgeable in the field, and that would allow me to learn more about the world of stocks and, hopefully, start making investments that could generate some profit. Additionally, his proposal to take profits only if the investment was actually successful did not seem to impose any major risk. Carl Roberts also advertised many times the launch of an unprecedented Market Maker Plan once the Skyline Alliance reached 100,000 members across all the clients in the various groups they handled. Those of us in this particular WhatsApp group didn't know when that number would be reached, but eventually, he did indeed announce the launch of the plan. There was a presentation that he shared in the WhatsApp group that explained that the essence of the Market Maker Plan was “to leverage the advantage of having a large number of participants, substantial capital and unity to operate”. By the time I was included in this group, I Googled Carl Roberts and his Skyline Alliance, and Google did indeed provide some information (very limited, but it existed) that corroborated part of what I was seeing in the WhatsApp group. There was a website that mentioned the Skyline Alliance and included photos of the alleged executives who worked there, included Carl Roberts. Carl Roberts' photo on that website was the same one he used on his WhatsApp profile (the image of a man with Asian features, short black hair, roughly in his 40s). My interaction with this group started toward the end of March 2024, when he recommended buying two shares on the stock exchange: Oceaneering International Inc (NYSE: OII) first, and Algonquin Power & Utilities Corp (NYSE: AQN) later. Carl Roberts provided numerical examples of recommendations he had made in the past to other groups of clients and the returns those stocks had supposedly generated. He also frequently provided a detailed summary of how the stock market was performing, along with general economic and financial data. All of this made him seem like a very well-informed person with the good intention of keeping his clients always informed. Carl Roberts continued to provide updates on the performance of these two stocks for about three months (from April to June 2024), until he stated that the stock market was experiencing a downturn and that it was best to sell our positions to avoid further losses and move our interest and our funds to the crypto market. At the beginning he presented himself a little averse to crypto investments due to the market's inherent risks but explained that we couldn't ignore the reality the crypto market was experiencing: a promising moment in which significant gains could be expected if things unfolded as they had in previous Bitcoin halving cycles. At certain point of this discourse about transitioning from the world of stocks to the crypto world, he introduced the platform called Linuscoin that he and his network of friends, supposedly comprised of major international investors, used. It was, in theory, a legitimate platform for buying, selling, and trading cryptocurrencies. Linuscoin was indeed an app that could be downloaded from any mobile app store, like any other cryptocurrency app. They also had a website called www.linuscoin.com, but it really never worked well, so I decided that I better used only the app. There were two forms of making profits on this platform: 1) By the allocation of tokens for ICOs: the person would submit a pre-sale application for an ICO advertised in the chat, and the platform would allocate a certain amount of tokens, refunding any unused funds into your Linuscoin account. At the moment of the token's launch, its price would increase, and the person would profit from the price difference between the moment when the token was acquired and when it was launched. 2) By following Carl Roberts’ crypto trading signals (he also called this his Market Maker Plan): he would provide the instruction to buy a particular coin. The supposed purchase of this coin by several people, especially investors who put up large amounts of capital, would cause the price to rise, at which point those individuals would sell, profiting from the transaction. Carl Roberts charged $50 per every successful transaction in the Market Maker Plan, and he said that most of that money went to charitable activities and the rest of his team of analysts. In one of those trading sessions (July 2024), my whole account liquidated, the amount dropped to $0. Luckily for me, the money in my account at that time was from profits made on the platform. The money I had invested up to that point had already been withdrawn (just a fortunate coincidence). In either of these two methods they had to make profits, there were always people posting in the chat how excited they were and showing screenshots of their profits that sometimes were huge, in the order of five to six digits. Things that made me think the group was legit: 1) Carl Roberts posted almost daily financial market updates or news and detailed descriptions about the coins that were part of the ICOs. This made him seem like a transparent person, interested in our financial education. 2) The information he shared in the group chat made him seem very knowledgeable, like he was "playing in the big leagues" of crypto. At one point, he was supposedly competing in an international crypto competition and asked us to please vote for him on the Linuscoin app. 3) He seemed to be very a approachable person. In all the interactions I had directly with him with questions I had throughout the process, he usually responded quickly, clearly, and kindly. 4) He always presented himself as a very good citizen with gestures such as respecting national holidays, saying that he would not communicate information that day because the days of rest had to be respected, or by sending messages such as inviting people to enjoy the profits obtained on the platform in a healthy way, and share happy moments with the family, which at the end was the idea of achieving financial prosperity. 5) At the very beginning of my interaction with Linuscoin, I received emails from an alleged customer service email address with information like Registration Verification Code, ICOs notifications, and platform maintenance notification. Later I never received emails from this address again, but all updates were posted in the app's notifications section, so I never felt like I was uninformed. 6) Within the L102 Carl Investment Alliance WhatsApp group there was a Linuscoin customer service representative who could be contacted directly to clarify any of our doubts. It was through this customer service representative that I received a video and learned how to transfer funds to and from Linus to other exchanges. He was always diligent in answering all my questions. 7) They shared a document of the MSB Registration in the website “Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, Department of Treasury” (https://www.fincen.gov/) as a proof of the company’s legitimacy. The MSB Registration Number was: 31000210534271, under the legal name “Linus Blockchain Foundation”. 8) I could deposit and withdraw money from the Linuscoin app using other well-known exchanges without any apparent problem, which made me think that the platform was legit. I specifically opened a CashApp account to send money to Linus and a Kraken account to deposit the funds I was able to withdraw from Linus. The transactions in my CashApp account show that I sent to Linuscoin the amount of 0.173214 Bitcoin equivalent to $11,408.29. The transactions in my Kraken account show that I withdrew from Linuscoin (and deposited in my Kraken account) the amount of 2.1077 Ethereum equivalent to $7,530.84 and the amount of 0.06986 Bitcoin equivalent to $4,455.18 (Total deposit in Kraken: $11,986.02). Things that raised red flags before the platform collapsed: 1) Carl Roberts' insistence on suggesting that we increase our funds in the account to access the benefits of his VIP group. 2) The frequency of messages from group members celebrating and showing their gains. 3) The instance in which my account wiped out. My involvement in this story ended on October 15th, 2024, when two of the ICO tokens I had previously applied to through the pre-sale application were supposed to be listed. The names of these tokens were “CRUH” and “EGLD”. On October 15th of 2024, before the listing time, people received a “market manipulation warning notice” in the Linuscoin app stating that we could be facing a penalty if we had engaged in market manipulation. When the tokens were finally listed, the platform wouldn't let anybody close their positions, indicating that we had to pay a fine for engaging in malicious transactions. Carl Roberts asked us to contact Linus customer service to resolve the issue. When I contacted the customer service representative, he told me that I had to pay a fine of $8,000 to reactivate my account. When I asked him how it was possible that he had never warned us about any irregularities or market manipulation if he was part of the WhatsApp group in which Carl Roberts gave all the instructions for ICOs and trading the coins, there was no response. This set off all my alarm bells and I realized that I had most likely been a victim of a major scam and that I had to immediately stop interacting with these people. Some members of the chat still commented that they contacted customer service, paid the fine, and they were able to close their position. At this point I thought that these were most likely messages from the scammers encouraging desperate people to pay the fine in the hope of closing their positions and being able to withdraw their money, while Carl Roberts and his team continued to collect more funds and shut down the platform immediately afterward. Indeed, this episode happened on October 15th and within a few days the app was no longer available. In my particular case, I didn't lose money. For security reasons, I continued making partial withdrawals of my investments throughout my interaction with the platform, and by a stroke of luck, the money I had invested was already out when the platform went down. I actually withdrew $577.73 more than what I had invested. What was trapped there was profit made from transactions in the platform. On October 16th, Carl Roberts sent a last message in the group chat indicating that he was working on the incident about the fine. On November 1st of 2024, I was removed from the WhatsApp group.