Warning
What have we learnt about Apollo and Steve McCullah from this thread so far:Back in early 2018 Apollo falsely sold the premise of an ICO being a CDE to fool people into investing into a security. By a quick change in wording, Apollo changes it from an ICO to CDE. Apollo tricked non-financial people into believing this was not a security therefore it was not illegal to purchase. This was far from the truth as at today Apollo boasts gold back securities (GSX), property gold mine ownership and dividend payouts. All this said Apollo's forging (staking) of APL and referral bonuses all provide an income. As previously mentioned in this thread the SEC historically deemed other companies and similar business models as securities. Incidentally the ICO/CDE ended in late 2020 which adds to the many red flags. That is to say to have such a long period to collect funds for a ICO/CDE is especially not heard of in the precious metals field.
To add to confusion for the investors when GSX was introduced the published white paper contradicted itself and bans Americans and various other countries from investing. At the same time on Apollo’s official Telegram group they dismiss this stating that anybody from any country could invest. This is very contradictory, a second red flag.
Apollo also claimed to be non profit during this early era of 2018. Apollo’s own admission was they in fact did not submit or have their paperwork processed to back up this claim. This did not stop Apollo from advertizing this “non-profit” foundation in order to sell their CDE. Yet another red flag.
From here non compliance pushed Apollo relocating from Texas, US to Malta. From November 2019 Malta introduced the Virtual Financial Act. The Malta Financial Services Authority (MFSA) required all platforms dealing with virtual currencies to register. Apollo was never found in Malta’s government website as being registered. In fact Apollo has not registered in any country to sell any security. Incidentally Apollo is now registered in Hong Kong.
On the 11 June 2018 the NXT developers complained Apollo breached the Jelurida Public Licence (JPL) as APL was based upon their code. The first copyright violation then ensued.
In late January 2019 Apollo made headlines as data was shared publicly of APL being and pump and dump (P&D) coin and was posted on Reddit. At this point Steve McCullah’s shady past with his dinosaur hunting and funding for this via Kickstarter became more public. This Kickstarted project failed as funds went “missing” with Stephen McCullah being the center of this attention. More emphasis should be put onto the project’s CTO, the Ukrainian named Sergey Rokhvarg, and he is of even more interest. He’s the public face and director of the Ukrainian company Universal Information Technology (UIT), with corrupt high‐ranking Ukrainian officials use to launder funds from the state budget and Ukrainian state corporations. Again another shady character.
We also find back in July, 2018 the Twitter account for Vimana Global (Vimana) where Steve advertized, promoting Apollo’s technology where it will become part of Vimana Airspace network. A violation of copyright was submitted and then a subsequent letter to Apollo written stating Apollo has no right to sublicence Jelurida’s code and the proposed partnership with Apollo was concerning. This is the beginning to become all to familiar of Steve claiming other peoples technologies.
When Apollo launched Gold Secured Currency (GSX) they claimed ownership to gold mines, precious metals and property. By doing this Steve took another quick grab at investors money by launching this security where investors needed to buy in.
Steve also claimed GSX is pegged making it a stable growth coin. To date GSX has had a negative growth. GSX is not pegged to any asset and no independent 3rd party has done an audit on this to prove this asset is pegged.
However, to add validity to GSX a 3rd party audit was conducted, so say Apollo. This was according to Apollo done on the gold mines which allow GSX owners to asset ownership of these mines. Apollo reported that Munyaradzi Otis Marume conducted such a report. A quick google searched revealed Munyaradzi Otis Marume is “@itsForms”, “Dr Otis” and “The Consultant” on twitter who pushes the scam product Super Life STC30.
Reading the report by Munyaradzi there were grammatical errors and a report non consistent with current industry standards. The date the report was written predated GSX, again providing red flags. Investigating Munyaradzi Otis Marume further; he claims to be an IT Consultant that runs a mining company Virtuous Environment while he sells a controversial multi-marketing product. At this point any confidence begins to waiver at Apollo’s business conduct in order to prove validity.
On the 22 September 2020 a Dutch Court ruled against Apollo for cloning over 75% of its code from Jelurida’s NXT code. Apollo was ordered to pay €38,780.73 and quickly dropped the counter-claim against JLD.
In addition to shady characters involvement with Apollo, John McAfee has definitely been controversial. John tweeted in mid 2019 his support of Apollo. Apollo’s team announced John McAfee was part of their team. In 2021 John was charged for tax invasion via his shilling of different virtual assets including Apollos Decentralized Bank (that never existed). As we all know, John committed suicide and the court cases were dismissed. Again another red flag for a shady character being involved with Apollo.
In order to evaluate how Stephen McCullah operates we need to take a look data he published on himself. In 2018 Steve claimed to have two bachelor degrees. One in premed from the Lamar University and the other bachelor from Drury University. This was reported on Steves Linkedin account. These Universities have no record of Steve completing either degrees. He was called out and denied everything. An interesting Youtube clip of Steve defending his reputation is embarrassing as his defence was “look everyone heres my Linkedin account and I deleted the words bachelor to prove I’m right, I never said that”. Unfortunately screenshots proved he was t0o late. More red flags as Steve thought he needed educational validation by lying.
With so many inconsistencies and red flags it prompted this author to investigate companies Steve has owned.
Steve was the CEO and owner of Tsavari that claimed to be a Gold company in South Africa. This was active between August 2014-2016. Looking up the business registry for Tsavari it was listed as being involved in retail, far from the suggested affairs of perpetrating in gold.
We also have the businesses CCMM Inc, Deluz Diamonds LLC and Diamond Trading Company. Steve has claimed and over embellished the company CCMM dealing with the US Military. He sold tourniquets. Interestedly enough in July 2016 a name change was made from Collar Craft and Petite Originals, Inc to CCMM, Inc.
A quick google search of catch phrases from CCMM lead to the company Evans Collars. What we can induce from this research is that Steve uses famous popular companies, and calls his companies with similar names hoping to trick people into believing he is successful. Steve is a business fabricator claiming other peoples successes.
To reinforce Steves behaviour for fabrication, Steve reported his company Tsavari.io made a US12 million dog collar for Paula Abdul, a famous client. This was not to be confused with Tsavari.com a completely different unrelated company. This did not stop Steve being interviewed and taking credit for such as reported by pursuits.com.
Apollo also advertized in early 2021, and that they were the first cryptocurrency to implement database sharing. This is wrong as RapidChain introduce Fast Cross-Shard Verification August 2018. Omniledger also implemented this in 2017. Again red flags for incorrect details presented by Apollo.
To push the boundaries of disbelief Stephen invents a new country called the United Allied States (UAS) where he claims defence budgets are allocated to him and where is is the President. What is the catch here, you need to pay money to belong to his country yet another making scheme. Everything Steve does requires someone to pay him money (US3500-$6000).
About the same time in late 2020 early 2021 Apollo releases documents that claim they are the owners of several gold mines to help ease investors worries and apparent FUD on the project. It was very unfortunate Apollo did this. These documents were proven fraudulent by the data contain in them. Information included the documents stating there were 8 copper claims as listed, however these were UTM coordinates for the location of the mines. Steve thought these were separate mines rather than 4 coordinates listing only 4 mines. Suspicion arose publicly towards Steve- who should have known the difference as he apparently owns many precious metal/mining companies before this.
Continuing with the topic of coordinates Apollo published more data and documents proving ownership of another 27 claims over 10,000 acres of land. Again this was misrepresented as Apollo was confused between the UTM coordinates and the MGRS Grid Reference and combined this data. Following the published coordinates and comparing to where Apollo says the mines are, we find the mines do not match the Apollo maps. More red flags.
At this point in the research it was noted that Steves father Bob (Robert) McCullah keeps popping up suggesting a close working relationship in this scam.
Since Apollo have gone governmental with their fake country (UAS) they have subsequently published a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Zimbabwe’s CBZ and government of Lesotho. It was then reported “a view that is held by one prominent African blockchain entrepreneur and educator who gave his opinion of about ‘shady’ Apollo’s MoU with Lesotho. The expert, who prefers to remain anonymous, says Apollo has not done anything concrete since announcing the MoU with the government of Lesotho in late 2019. He tells us that Lesotho officials have reportedly not heard from Apollo and consequently, they are now wary of (and less hospitable to) individuals approaching government with proposals that involve or concern the blockchain”-
https://iharare.com/apollos-mccullah-pushes-back-against-scam-allegations/. So far everything is looking more damning. Red flags are everywhere.
In addition to confusing statements Apollo stated “…physical bills cost a large portion of a country's G.D.P. to develop and maintain. The use of digital currency will save the government millions on printing money. The U.A.S. is committed to directing these funds to improve the lives of its citizens and offer true freedom. It's clear that this new government has learned from the mistakes of previous leaderships and is ready to rectify matters…A currency that continuously gets backing from a precious metal like gold is bound to have a high value…The agreement is for Fintech to develop a gold-backed digital currency for the country…” -
https://cryptodaily.co.uk/2020/08/uas-government-with-the-firstIt was then mind boggling when Steve decided to print fiat money for the UAS and claimed that there was real 24K gold incorporated in it, giving it value after stating it was a waste of money to print fiat. Whats more he claimed these notes were connected to the Apollo blockchain and all you had to do is scratch the bill revealing the blockchain code rending the fiat cash useless even with the 24K gold in it. It doesn’t make any sense does it? Another red flag.
We also find that this fake country UAS is controlled by Apollo Fintech people and their family members.
More shady characters such as the Run Guys are heavily involved with Apollo. They can be seen in promotional videos pushing the scam for Apollo Fintech. Not a great addition to the team.
On the topic of team members Apollo is notorious from claiming legitimate people are on their team when in fact they hired for various business tasks, and Apollo just adds them as team members within Apollo website. Such techniques link people with decent reputations to Apollo. This convinces people when researching that reputable people are involved with Apollo when they are not.
Marketing by Apollo is also questionable such as $4 million in prize giveaways including a Tesla cyber truck, Supers car and $3 million in gold and crypto. This is still to eventuate.
Apollo was also caught red handed claiming they had a billboard located at CA-02891 Irwindale CA and was quickly proven to be a lie. A digital billboard mockup was found on Behance.com. A Red flag again, fake news.
Also Apollo Fintech is linked to Karatbars International a well known pyramid scam and a warning was issued by the Bank Of Nambia not to participate. It is not surprising to see Apollo connection to this scam as the people involved in Karatbars is also on the Apollo team. Red flag.
Apollo has been promoting MGT Solar (mgtsolar.com), pushing the sale of the MG token (MGT). Whilst researching MGT Solar, Apollo team members were found be directly involved. The MGT Solar project have promoted that if you invest with them you would receive and incredible ROI. We find that MG token has tanked in value as has the GSX token. MGT Solar has taken a leaf from Apollos playbook and claimed outrageous projects and acquisitions including claiming reputable companies are backing the project. All of this is yet to be seen.
On to the Banking topic. One of the most outrageous claims is Steve wrote on Twitter (20 August 2021) that they were in the running to be the official Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) of India. On the 27 August 2021, seven days later Shaktikanta Das, the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India issued a statement different to Steve’s claim. The Central Bank would be moving towards the digital rupee that is controlled by the bank, however more trails are required. This is not what Steve claimed. At this point there are so many red flags that one starts to gag.
Since 2019, Steve claimed Apollo had several Banks located in Klerksdorp, Mossel Bay South Africa, Turkey and Australia. Researching these banks showed none of these were registered or existed. Further investigation showed they were small shops that claimed they could transfer and convert fiat into Apollos cryptocurrency, far from the truth Steve led the public to believe. There were no banks, another major red flag.
Again in 2020 Steve decides to have another go at telling his followers and investors that Apollo was 4 weeks away from launching in the US and a European branch bank. Steve says the European branch is the UAS branch and can hold funds for Americans tax free. Steve then states they will issue an exchange license to the biggest Exchanges such as Binance, OKEX so these Exchanges can incorporate in the UAS. To show stability Steve says this will be FDIC insured and accounts can never be frozen. It had been 1 year and 4 months since he stated this, it did not happen in the 4 week period Steve claimed it would.
In more recent times Steve has been pushing the announcement of more Banks in mid January 2022, now they are competing against Ripple with their native token XRP. With Steves history this will not happen as he is a proven liar. If is very unfortunate there are many many red flags and so many lies. Many people have lost their money.
On another note we are one step closer to another time frame where Steve will make up yet another excuse for doing nothing. At this point in time the investors in APL and GSX are becoming tiresome. Will 2022 be the year they will wake up from being deceived. A very sad state of affairs indeed.
Original Thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3233704.new#newEdit: Reworded a few paragraphs, corrected some spelling errors.
