MASSIVE Bitcoin Ponzi/Pyramid Scheme MTI (Mirror Trading International) in S.Africa draws 130,000 people – Lots of people will be hurt – My Investigation

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I’m going to reveal a secret now from April 2020, and this thing, sadly, will hurt lots of whites.

A friend of mine who is deeply involved in Bitcoin here in SA and has traded Bitcoin himself, told me about these guys, whites, who were experts at Bitcoin trading and they had developed their own software and they were making enormous sums of money. My friend had urged me to join them. He told me he’d been using them for long and he had made a lot of money. He and his dad had put masses of their savings into this thing – large amounts of money – by our standards, like $42,000+.

I spent almost a day investigating this lot called MTI, Mirror Trading International. I watched videos, looked at their software, etc, and I decided not to touch it. I told him this is a ponzi scheme. As recently as a week ago, he was encouraging me to join them.

I studied the returns he claimed he was getting from them versus Bitcoin’s actual performance and I was sure that the whole thing was a scam. But my friend claims he has put even more money into it and even bought himself a lovely car from the proceeds.

Well, today, I spotted warnings on a financial website where they say even American and Canadian authorities are beginning to take action against it.

My friend was trying to encourage me to join it and of course to tell other whites about it. I decided to say nothing to anyone because I reckoned this thing is going to hurt whites badly. But people have been running around promoting this thing, especially my friend – who I must say, has helped me in other things. So in the end I decided not to use it for myself, nor to endorse it.

However, this thing is now going to hit the wall and I have published 2 articles that come from an important financial website in South Africa. There are many articles about it. They are saying this thing is going to end very badly for people.

Here is the email I wrote to my friend on 25th April 2020 when I told him that my conclusion was that this is a sophisticated pyramid/ponzi scheme. It’s run by an Afrikaans guy who has run ponzi schemes before and got away with it. He previously defrauded blacks. But this time, he’s defrauding lots of whites and those whites are going to be very badly hurt. It is NOT illegal for him to run this, and he won’t go to jail for it!

Here is the long note I wrote to my friend who himself invests in MTI and wanted to sign me up. Accompanying this I also sent him a long and thorough voice note adding to what was in this email. I see now that MTI was claiming to have investors from 144 countries, however, in my long note to my friend, I had already determined that the main traffic was from America, Canada and South Africa only, which matches what other investigators have said recently. Here’s the long note I wrote:

Hi xxxx,
I’ve spent a couple of hours looking into this thing and I’m convinced this is nothing more than a pyramid marketing scam with a cute, but basic, front end. This guy who is running this is a known scam artist. I’m also going to send this to another pal of mine who has done research for me in the past, to see what he can find. I will show you what I’ve found and why I am extremely wary of this. I had thought of registering and just putting a small sum in, but now that I’ve looked at it, I won’t even register. This thing makes me EXTREMELY UNCOMFORTABLE.

Note, their offices are down the road from me. I can actually drive there for you if you wish. Its not far. If lockdown is lifted, I could even walk into their offices and pretend to be interested.

I will show you what I’ve discovered about 2 of the 3 guys who are interviewed.

I watched 20 minutes of this long chat with these guys in the USA at this URL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GRelQJTxWU&feature=youtu.be

These guys who are interviewing them, are pretty dodgy themselves. The number of people watching this US show is not much, and these guys are promoting nothing but passive platforms, and they might, themselves be taking commissions. These people do not strike me as serious.

Here is the registration page link you sent me for these guys:
https://mymticlub.com/userpanel/register.php?referral=xxxx1&place=right

xxxx, I write a lot of php myself. I looked at their website. Look closely at their links. For something that is worth millions of rands, that is run by serious professionals, I find the above to be pretty basic. All you have to do on their site is take any of those names that end in .php and change it. e.g. register.php – change that to registerx.php and it simply says: "file not found". That is extremely basic stuff. That means they don’t even have a "404" (page not found) piece of software. There’s something about that site that smacks of amateurs at work.

I watched this interview with Johan Steynberg the CEO:
https://www.revshares.co.za/qa-session-with-johann-steynberg-ceo-founder-mirror-trading-international/

When I listen to this guy, he does not say much. He hardly says anything that makes sense. He’s also a youngster and he does not seem very clever to me. His body language bothers me. He swallows a lot when people ask him pretty simple questions.

Their company is all the rage in South Africa, but very little interest from the USA. Check them on Alexa, which measures all website traffic: https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/mymticlub.com

For an international company, the vast majority of their traffic is only South African. South Africa with a tiny bit in the USA and Venezuela. So despite their big name, they’re basically South African only.

Americans are quite used to people tricking and scamming. I saw this in New York. Here is an Indian, of all people, in America, and he gives a short review of them and why he does not trust them. I’ll give my own reasons further down: https://www.revshares.co.za/mirror-trading-international-review-legit-forex-trading-investment-or-scam/

Here is one of several websites that has looked into them, and especially their CEO, and they note that this guy has a past obsession with quick money making schemes: https://behindmlm.com/mlm-reviews/mirror-trading-international-review-forex-trading-daily-returns/

Here’s another review from the USA which also says similar stuff: https://brokeveteran.com/mirror-trading-international-scam-or-legit-review/

On their about us page, and please, look closely at all the URLs. Here’s their income calculator and what it promises you. It makes impossible promises: https://www.mirrortradinginternational.com/income-calculator/

If I put in 1 bitcoin, it is basically promising to triple it in a year. This is impossible – even with Bitcoin. I’ll show you charts.

This is what they claim on the about us page: https://www.mirrortradinginternational.com/about-us/

Currently we have 26,174 active members in 144 countries, and these numbers are growing by the day.
There are over 3,749.18 Bitcoin in trade daily.

That’s an OUTRIGHT LIE. They say they are spread over 144 countries. But I’ve shown you what Alexa knows about them. So there’s no f*cking way they are known in 144 countries. They get traffic from 3 countries, and the vast amount of traffic is from South Africa as per Alexa.

They also say: Registered Name: Mirror Trading International (PTY) LTD Registration Number: 2019/205570/0720

On some of the write-ups about them, people have said that there is so little to go on. Their "paper trail" is almost non-existent.

The total number of Bitcoins they claim they have, would, if it existed, be worth R530 million.

This Johan Steynberg, their CEO was involved in a pyramid scheme for blacks, called Kipi. That was itself a scam. Here is some stuff on Kipi: https://nationaldebtadvisors.co.za/nda-blog/suspected-pyramid-scheme-kipi-investments-hacked/

Kipi was a stockvel, and I think he was cheating blacks: https://nationaldebtadvisors.co.za/nda-blog/interested-in-stokvels-watch-out-for-stokvel-scams/

Kipi was also a pyramid/ponzi/MLM (Multilevel Marketing) scheme.

Johann – lives in Polokwane, up in the north. This is what the website informer knows about him:
https://website.informer.com/Johann+Steynberg.html

At the above URL you’ll get his postal address, phone and also various email addresses he’s had.

Look at the domain names he owned:
Websites formerly associated with this person or business entity:

bitcoinmine.co.za – Bitcoin Mine News – Bitcoin & Altcoin Mining & Trading News
Keywords: bitcoin news, the dollar vigilante, ledger nano s, venezuela internet shutdown
onlinebusinesscoach.co – Welcome to onlinebusinesscoach.co
Keywords: make money online, make money, mlm, multi level marketing, diesel, petrol, jim rohn, warren buffet, donald trump, Fuel
getsuperrich.com
kipisa.com – Domain Profile – Afternic
Keywords: kipisa
mydeposit241.co.za – CLOSED
Keywords: non-profit organization, www.mydeposit241.co.za

See above: kipisa – the kipi scam was his. He also had some deposit think going. Check out his "getsuperrich.com". This guy is a scam artist and this is not his first scam.

Let’s look at his linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johann-steynberg-b2a63288/?originalSubdomain=za
Same fellow, living in Polokwane. What has he done? Very little:

Experience
Syntek Global South Africa
Network Marketing Professional
Dates EmployedJul 2014 – Present
Employment Duration 5 yrs 10 mos

Education
Hatfield Business College
Dates attended or expected graduation2002 – 2002

Polokwane High School
Dates attended or expected graduation1997 – 2001

According to the above he’s still at Syntek.

Of the 3 of them who appeared on the video, I could not find Johan Kruger, because there are 300+ of them on linkedin.

But I could find the guy in Cape Town with ease:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaco-eckley-298b9a70/?originalSubdomain=za

The only thing on his linkedin page is:
Jaco Eckley

JacoHandyMan
Cape Town Area, South Africa Contact info

HandyMen Co.
Experience

That’s it. Nothing more.

Here’s another interview with Johann Steynberg by those same guys, back in November: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmpXXQ-V9sg

I watched a bit of it, but I see nothing that shows me that this guy knows anything about his topic.

It was while watching this video about their "back office" that I noticed the URLs, and began fiddling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V2vaTF_fds

Also, everyone who is positive about them, is referring them with a referer id like you. So EVERYONE who is referring them, is getting his 10% commission. e.g: https://richsimmondsza.com/2019/04/30/mirror-trading-international/

The most interesting and detailed thread and analysis of them can be found in a long thread over here: https://mybroadband.co.za/forum/threads/mirror-trading-international.1064664/

If you browse it enough, you’ll see some old veterans on that website and their comments – people who have posted more than 1,000 times. But most interesting, look on the bottom of the URL and you’ll see none other than Johan Steynberg (this time spelled with one n), and some photos of him with blacks. It looks as if this was when he was scamming the blacks with Kipi.

If you return to the Alex page, you’ll see how they get traffic: https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/mymticlub.com
It is ALL Google, Youtube and Facebook. No serious business, no serious website, or investment analyst is pushing them. In fact, some of the websites referring them are weird: surfe.be and adbtc.top

All this suggests to me that they are not a real company with any real business or real partners.

Here is a website that analyses the technology used for their site: https://whatcms.org/?s=mymticlub.com
It even shows the URLs of their site, which by the way, is kind of dodgy if your site is dealing in hundreds of millions of rands. You would have better security, hiding the URLs so that hackers can’t hack their way in. Go and check the URL of your bank the next time you login and compare it to the open, easily readable, php urls. I can even see your account name. It is: xxxx1.

If they were a huge business, hackers would be trying to hack in day and night. Take any URL and add a letter or take a letter away and see what it displays. Try the same thing with your bank. You’ll see a difference.

Learning PHP is easy. I also learned it in bits and pieces. Its a nice language. But anyone with a bit of brains can learn it quite easily.

Here is a chart of the Bitcoin prices in USD for this year: https://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=$BTCUSD

You say you’ve been using them for 4.5 months. So did you make any losses when Bitcoin crashed in USD in the middle of March? It was a big crash.

I was wondering, since Steynberg had cheated people before I wondered why he had not been caught. It turns out that pyramid schemes are not actually properly illegal in South Africa. See: https://www.iol.co.za/personal-finance/pyramid-scams-thriving-in-sa-1980769

A short quote from the above article is this, and take note that not only kipi, but also mydeposit241, which is also linked to Steynburg comes up in the article:

Fourie says informed and high-net-worth investors are among those who have put money into the likes of Kipi, also known as Mydeposit241, one of the schemes that the NCC investigated.

Fourie, a Certified Financial Planner and professional accountant with a post-graduate diploma in advanced taxation and investments, says a client who approached him for tax advice had “invested” in Kipi and last year invited Fourie to address an investment club of which the client was a member.

“All the members of the club had put money in Kipi and didn’t know how to deal with the income they had received.

“I was shocked! ‘Are you stupid? Where is the income generated from?’ I asked. He didn’t know, so he arranged for me to meet someone from Kipi. When I questioned him about the assets used to generate this huge income, the guy got very aggressive, because the money is derived from other so-called investors,” Fourie says.

The whole article above is well worth reading.

I am amazed that they only ask your name and mobile number. Luckily no ID number. But whatever info you’ve given, they now have that info on their database.

I will send you a voice note regarding other issues:-
o Forex Trading or Bitcoin Trading?
o The reasons Johann gave for not showing live trading
o The Support Team
o Jaco’s remark about his wife selling.
o Robot Trading & ETFs
o 500 Robot trades per day

jlamprecht