HyperVerse hedge fund CEO may not exist — Investigation finds no record of identity after collapse causing an estimated $1.3 billion in customer losses::HyperVerse’s collapse caused an estimated $1.3 billion in customer losses.
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The real fun is trying to track down who actually OWNS these companies. They hide their names behind shell companies and redacted filings.
I think you misspelled “capitalist.”
I don’t think being a capitalist requires being shady, nor that being some other economic system would stop some people being shady.
Some potential solutions: Governments could decide corporations must have actual named people in charge, ID by say passports or drivers licenses validated in person at an office to be issued an LLC or whatever.
People also do sometimes use brands or other company identifiers when deciding who to purchase from.
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That might be your framing of capitalism, but I’d argue it’s one that takes into account the reality of greed and tries to harness it to run the system.
Government actors - kind of what I think of as a common alternative to capitalism - also act shady and like to hide who they are for many reasons not related to money but instead to power. They have just as much incentive, driven by a potentially similar base human desire, that are orthogonal at best to capitalism if not it’s opposite. I suppose you can argue that non capitalist governments, or governments in non capitalist or capitalist societies do not have shady politicians, but that seems like a very difficult argument to make.
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Yes, capitalism is shitty. I will not say it’s a good system, just that it seems to be the least bad a large scale society has managed to implement. Large attempts to explicitly be anti-capitalist didn’t work out better than current day late stage capitalism by any metric I’m aware of.
But all of that is irrelevant to the main point that saying there cannot be scammers because capitalism inherently makes all participants scammers is just incorrect.
Jesus, I hate these arguments so much.
Look at how well this works
The planet is dying, majority of people are hungry, and only the lucky few are living their own utopia, while the rest gets fucked.
And no, the ‘current system’ didn’t help people out of poverty, instead it robbed every developing nations of their future. And everyone else, too.
I get that you said ‘we got nothing better to happen’, but why? US won the second war and pushed everyone to suck its dick. So like yeah, capitalism for everyone?
You’re not engaging with my actual argument that I know plenty of Capitalists who I would not classify as “scammers”. The whole thing that started this was someone claiming that anyone who buys into capitalism is inherently a scammer. Clearly there’s a difference between a con-artist and a regular employee at a company. There’s an obvious difference between a scammer and a self employed person. Right there are 2 pretty hard to argue examples that people who buy into capitalism aren’t inherently scamming anyone.
Some potential solutions: Governments could decide corporations must have actual named people in charge, ID by say passports or drivers licenses validated in person at an office to be issued an LLC or whatever.
I think the forced “this person is ultimately to be held accountable” would help a lot.
They can break it up if they want, based on company size in that country. Have responsible persons for departments and so on. But only in addition to the one at the top, so now they are jointly held accountable, each 50%, basically.
These people as you say need to be verified with ID and all, and on top of that need to have their finances registered as, like I said, they’re responsible. If the company fucked it up, they fucked it up.
This sounds like a good idea, but is basically getting rid of LLCs entirely and going back to partnerships or some other structure. That said, having LLCs kind of lets people just do bad stuff and no-one is responsible. I think the idea of LLCs was potentially OK (hard to get stockholders if every investor is personally liable for what the company does), the people making decisions on a daily basis need to not be shielded IMHO. And / Or we need to get more comfortable with a corporate death sentence where courts just regularly revoke the license / charter if the company is bad enough.
It’s not just stock holders. I wouldn’t even hire an employee if I was criminally liable for things they do.
Say I run a restaurant and my wait staff are photographing credit cards and selling them… that’s not my fault, nothing really I can do to prevent it.
LLCs are essential.
Yet people managed to run restaurant’s, and all manor of other businesses before 1977!
(1977 is when the LLC classification was first created in Wyoming)
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Let’s make an AI to run the country then. Can’t bribe it, and it will work for the greater good or turn us into paperclips.
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You don’t need AI to create a fake person. Scammers have been doing that for decades, or stealing people’s identity. Even a video can be made with an actor.
Why wasn’t the original article linked to instead? The ArsTechnica article literally just quotes the Guardian over and over.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
For years, rumors spread on social media that Steven Reece Lewis, the chief executive officer of a now-shuttered cryptocurrency hedge fund called HyperVerse, was a “fake person” who “doesn’t exist.”
Fanning out their search, The Guardian uncovered no LinkedIn account for Reece Lewis “or any Internet presence other than HyperVerse promotional material.”
Celebrities and influencers, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, endorsed Reece Lewis as a strong leader for the HyperVerse.
In 2022, a writer for the British tabloid called The Mirror, Andrew Penman, attempted to raise a red flag, noting that all three of the celebrities (Wozniak, Chuck Norris, and Lance Bass) who endorsed Reece Lewis declined to confirm ever knowing him.
None of the famous figures has ever confirmed that they’ve met or spoken to Reece Lewis, the Guardian reported, suggesting that it was possible that all three may have been hired to do the marketing videos through Cameo.
While his identity remains in question, his pinned tweet has a link to a promo video for the HyperVerse, with a caption that reads, “where reality ends and imagination begins.”
The original article contains 697 words, the summary contains 178 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
