Recently, I made some promises.
I promised to tell how a modern scam scheme operates, who are the people behind the ADARA Cryptoexchange project and how to avoid falling victim to fraudsters. I was happy to see the crypto community showing its acclaim sharing my humble investigative efforts.
Scam researchers (like myself and other investigative journalists) are picking on those riffraffs of the blockchain society, and this is a great sign of the community’s improving health.
Now, it’s time to fulfil some of what I promised to the public and I decided to pick up some personalities from the investor milking machine and scam scheme, which ADARA project is.
Namely one nice guy — mr. Sten Laureyssens.
The opinions expressed here are those i received from my interviews with people who ran into problems with this person, giving him money and receiving something unexpected in exchange.
Mr. Sten Laureyssens is a well known figure in the international crypto community: He was associated with a venture capital fund Connect Capital, which, in turn, was investing into blockchain technology startups all over the world, but mainly in Eastern Europe and Russia. Now he is not with them any more. He was one of founders/advisors for the $ 32 mln Storm startup. The idea behind the startup was to pay people to do something during their idle time. Instead of passing numerous meaningless tests in social networks, users could get paid for spending their time on watching ads or doing something useful. Ok, great idea. Especially now, when we hear that token holders experience difficulties accessing their tokens. Any hint of fraud, maybe? He is not with this startup anymore either. He was also associated with other tech startups, making the ICO in past: Apex Nucleus Vision, Icon, and Fr8.
The mode was the same everywhere: Present himself as an expert and market-maker, get a huge share of tokens at pre-ICO, pump up the token value, then get the money and go away, leaving the startup team alone with their own problems.
Then MR. Sten leaves abruptly and moves to Moscow, Russia, to become one of the figures in the ADARA Cryptoexchange.
Now I think it’s time to tell something about his family, especially his father, who is also a well known figure, but in rather different circles:
Mr Dirk Laureyssens presents himself as: master in political and social sciences, inventor, lateral thinker, developer of toys and games, logo developer, painter, sculptor, photographer, conceptor, patent writer, philosopher-cosmologist, involved in video compression technologies, a new venture capital system, solar energy, gravitational power plant, council member of the grandiosely named Internet Names Authorization & Information Center (INAIC), the owner of 150+ patents and shareholder of several companies, and whose recent publicly visible activity focuses on bashing his former clients.
In Russia, such people are called “Ряженый” “Ryazheniy”, i.e. impostor. If we take Moscow, there is plenty of people with fake diplomas, fake ID’s of non-existent structures, like Kossack Army Generals (there is no such thing as Kossack Army!) etc. etc. The purpose of flashing a fake ID or presenting yourself as someone important is very clear: to gain an opportunity to fraud people.
And this is here where mr Sten has moved. I do not implicate though that mr Sten has moved there to start a fraud, some may say he moved there for personal reasons, for the sake of his love interest who happens to be one of the founders of ADARA Cryptoexchange, but you know, some people are hard to keep away from temptation (he graduated from Catholic University Leuven, so the word “Temptation” is nothing new to him). And the Russian temptation is to meet and greet investors from Russia, China, Korea, and, last but not least, former Soviet Republics, and persuade them to give their money for a good cause promising huge returns very soon, flashing regalia and former glory. Anyway, the machine has started. Investors brought money, finance the project, and what did Mr Sten do? Did he bring in the awaited results? No. Did he start the token sale, or do something like this? No. Instead he started to burn investors’ money as if there were no tomorrow: Set up so that and his friends got huge bonuses for being nice people and giving promises, and nothing more, purchase luxury goods on corporate account, ride around the world for the conferences and pronounce clever words. And quite recently, as I have found out, he got involved in a money-laundering scheme and direct fraud against an Armenian family business. The details of this episode I am not at liberty to disclose, but I had a talk to it’s representative and can tell, that a sum of around hundreds of thousands of euros simply “vanished away”, before it even got invested anywhere.
So, my next article is going out very soon, and we will see more of personalities of this drama. Stay Tuned!
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