It has been over one month since SiliconANGLE reported exclusively on the intricate web behind one of the biggest Bitcoin scams since Mt. Gox, the tale of Tadas Kasputis and his related Bitcoin companies, EgoPay, Virtex.com and PaymentBase.

Since first exposing the elaborate scam, this site has naturally received a pile of emails; the majority of which were from other victims of the scam, through to someone who claims to know Kasputis and claims he was the fall guy, and in one case the threat of legal action.

Here’s the highlights of what we’ve received.

We were conservative about how much was stolen

At the time of writing in January we stated that the amount we could roughly confirm that had been stolen through EgoPay was around the $500,000 mark, but as we noted at the time, “that’s only from a small range of its larger clients.”

Tadas Kasputis

 I have since been in contact with a significant number of other victims/ clients and today we’d put the figure as closer to $4 million, while noting that we still think it’s the tip of the iceberg. One Forex company we’ve corresponded with, who we have agreed to not name, claims to have lost $1 million alone to EgoPay.

While we don’t believe that the people who have contacted us were undertaking any illegal business (indeed they are clearly the victims here), it’s a fact that EgoPay and Kasputis were linked to the high yield investment program (HYIP) community; think ponzi scams that offer 80 percent a month to get a rough idea as to what’s involved. We’d suggest that those with a business relationship with EgoPay involved in that space probably wouldn’t be forthcoming with how much was stolen from them.

It is speculation, but we’d now take a guess that the amount stolen by Tadas Kasputis across his three companies is probably in the vicinity of $10 million, but unlike the figure of $4 million we can’t back that, other than to note that it’s an educated guess based on the picture that has been presented.

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Alleged photo of Amir Aziz

Kasputis as a front man for someone else?

One of the more interesting conversations we had since the original story was with someone who claimed to know Kasputis and claims that he was nothing more than a front man for a Pakistani citizen named Amir Aziz.

Aziz has been named on several sites as the actual owner of EgoPay, but the thing to note is that while he might possibly have been the money man, there’s zero question that Tadas Kasputis was the registered owner of the company. The owner of EgoPay is a company by the name of Ecommerce WorldWide Group Ltd., a registered company in New Zealand with Kasputis listed as the sole director.

According to the email from the source:

From day one he [Amir Aziz] had everything on someone elses name, and Tadas was a naïve person who went along with it.  He got a job, a title, and made a good salary.  Amir communicated with Tadas, and then Tadas with the rest of the team.  You won’t find much on him online, since he’s was always operating behind the scenes. I personally  thought Tadas was just a dummy or a yes man.

He goes on to argue that among other things Virtex.com was also a Aziz company, and that PaymentBase, although originally set up by Kasputis, was then acquired by Aziz.

The source then claims that with EgoPay the scam worked as follows:

Amir Aziz was embezzling funds from the company without the knowledge of anyone from day 1.  He would simply create fake deposits then gradually exchange the currency out via exchangers or Virtex[.com] for PayPal, Bitcoin and Payza.

The scheme was simple.  He would create an internal deposit for $10,000 USD.  Then he would send those funds to an exchanger to cash out.  He would get PayPal for it.  When the exchanger redeems their funds, Egopay sends them $10,000 from their bank accounts.  However these funds never existed eventually draining the bank accounts.  This was repeated multiple times.

We’ve done some background research into Amir Aziz and, as the source suggested to us in the emails, there’s not many records of him online, except that he’s since been linked to EgoPay via several sites linked above.

We did note in our original post that there was an ongoing link between Kasputis and a person, or people in Pakistan. Was it Aziz? At this stage we just can’t say with any certainty, although we will continue to investigate the matter.

Erik Schryvers

The upset, lawsuit-threatening guy: not the actual banker

In our original post we named the banker for Virtex.com to be one Erik Schryvers of Oostmalle, Belgium. Schryver’s so-called legitimate New Zealand registered financial business, Arex Ltd., that has as its registered business address an old house in suburban Mt. Eden, Auckland, was named repeated times publicly as providing banking services to Virtex.com.

In correspondence Schryvers claimed that “in [the] first instance, we agreed to work with them but then, after we did our due diligence, we found out that neither Virtex nor EgoPay had any financial license in order to operate their businesses.”

He then argued that he never worked with Virtex.com and when asked why he never corrected the public record, he claimed he was unaware that his company had been linked to them publicly.

The emphasis in the earlier quote is ours, but it’s a direct quote: we never alleged he was working with EgoPay, only Virtex.com, he simply confirmed that they were all being run by the same person, Tadas Kasputis, and further, he admitted to having at least a brief relationship with them, be it not an ongoing one.

Schryvers wasn’t happy with the original article, and he subsequently sent a demand letter threatening legal action against the owners of this site if the entire section naming him as the banker was not removed.

We have not removed the section, although we note we have amended the original post to read in part to include:

SiliconANGLE is unable to disprove Schryvers claims, as the sole director of Arex Ltd., that the company did not actually engage in a full and or ongoing financial relationship with Virtex.com, and hence we withdraw any such implications that may have damaged Mr. Schryvers reputation, and hereby apologize, with reservations.

The fact that Schryvers started his online career pushing multi-level marketing scams, later graduating to HYIP programs and has also taken an interest in crytpocurrency exchange services, having registered names including ekopay.com under Arex is a matter for the public record; the fact that despite his litigious nature he has never tried to deny this speaks volumes about his background and credibility in such matters.

His outstanding allegation was that he was never contacted him for comment prior to the original article; the funny thing is for a so-called legit finance guy he makes himself extraordinarily difficult to contact, but contact him we did, 5 days before publishing the original piece.

Do you know more?

Our investigation into Kasputis, related companies, and even those linked such as Schryvers and Aziz remains ongoing.

If you’re a victim, or can add more information to this story, please feel free to contact the author per the details provided below.

The Bitcoin community deserves better than this rubbish. It’s the opinion of this author that while in 2015 venture capital and legitimacy is flowing into the Bitcoin market, there’s still an awful lot of rubbish out there, and this tale is only but one. It’s never nice talking to people who have been scammed by the likes of the people written about here, and every time it happens it damages Bitcoin, an ingenious idea that with legitimate support has the potential of going far.