The story of how Cryptolion or Cameron Robert Faulds scammed an entire community of 500 people using his role and advisor and community bounty manager for Utrust to do it.
This story may not make full sense to someone who was on the outside. But is still a very interesting read. Stay away from anything Cameron Faulds is involved in AKA Cryptolion.
There are other dodgy scams and deals he has been involved with but it is just too much to cover. The point of this post on steemit is so there is a record of it forever. None of us are that interested in the money side of things, this is about telling the story.
How it began
It all started with a secret coin fund account.
People contributed and sent Lion Eth to get a special 4 cent deal on Utrust. Slightly better than the 5.2 cent deal you can get yourself.
Here was the original plan for the fund. It changed several times as lion slowly changed the prices to suit his needs. This was fine. Final result was 4 cents, everyone agreed and was fine with that.
All questions asked about the changing prices were just ignored or swept under the rug as it was 2 cents then 5 cents then 4.5 cents then finally 4 cents this was the first red flag for me.
A total of 63581.59256 BQX and 52.61837405 eth was collected in two different accounts. From Around the 18th of September onwards. Eth price was never below $280 from this day. Myself and others traced back peoples deposits and they were mostly made around the 18th and 19th of September or later. BQX was supposed to be sold on the 26 October and converted to ETH in lions own words "to make it simple". Everyone agreed and lion sold for 80-100 cents or as he said 83 cents (later he changed this to 87 cents when his own records he posted showed he was wrong). Either way it should have been around 180-200 ETH in total after all the BQX was sold.
Took him over a week to work out these simple concepts. This is very strange, he claimed it was complicated, but you can export to CSV file in excel and do all the calculations in around 5 minutes. There should have been only 3-4 other variables to consider, such as SOLD BQX for total of 180 ETH. Total fund now equals 180+53 eth(minimum). Then the next calc should have been, purchase 50% utrust, but that turned into 33% utrust so at the very least 78 ETH worth of UTK.
The next factor is the date he purchased and what price ETH was when he bought. That actually shouldn't matter because he would have got a set amount of UTK in a single transaction, just like everyone else. But because we know he is fudging the numbers he would have had to work out the eth price.
If I was looking after the fund everything would have been done from one account, two initially then consolidated into one ETH account. Everything in and out to the same account, no dodgy shit.
Both mingo and UTK were bought on different accounts and not deposited back into the fund account. UTK was not even a purchased it was totally faked. As we all know he received a bounty from Nuno/Utrust.
BQX went out .. nothing came back. He claims he kept it in BTC rather than ETH.
Some of the lies and screenshots proving those lies!
Come utrust time and Lion is on holiday and we have to wait 2 weeks for him to come back. Sure enough the time he comes back coincides with a transfer into one of his accounts to the amount of 3.75 million tokens.
I watched the UTK Dashboard adress on etherscan for when lion got back from holiday. This is the only transaction with no decimals so it stood out. I then matched it up with Brandon posting to facebook he made $68,000 in one day when the UTK was at around 10x. This ment Brandon must have got $75k UTK and I saw the transaction come out of Lions wallet.
I gave Brandon many chances to be honest but he keeps going on about how he turned 25k UTK into 100k. When we all know he got 75k not 25k.
Screenshot of some eagle eyed people spotting an outgoing transaction from Utrust that didn't look like all the others.
Before coming back from his holiday Lion after a few questions from people lion makes a statement that the fund is too complicated he will just pay out 3x and be done with it.
It is at this stage that myself and several others question this and it takes another 2 days for lion to respond. I assume so he can try to make sure what he is saying isn't made up.
Doing the calculations with utrust at 10x the ICO price plus whatever left over amount should be left and not including mingo the total payout should have been around 6x not 3x. (mingo was another ICO lion invested a small amount of the fund in).
The heroku sheet showed that there was 33% of the fund spent on UTK and lion confirmed this in the chat also many times. Doing elementary school math you could figure out that would be around 560-600 UTK for 33% of the fund, depending on what price lion "bought" the tokens at.
Lion then posted that the hereku site was wrong it is around 300-350 UTK. Wait hang on? if you bought them shouldn't you know the exact number?
Eth price during the ICO was never lower than $280, also from the time the fund was due to buy the tokens even weeks before the ICO it never fell below 280 dollars. Going by that logic there should have been around 550+ UTK.
I looked through the fund accounts and there was all sorts of dodgy stuff going on. Fund should be easy. Transfers in and transfers out. Nothing about the transfers out added up and there was no transfers back in.
I private messege Lion
Please note I sugar coat and play dumb a lot here to pander to Lion. So any comment that looks like I don't care is the opposite of how I felt, but this is how you have to talk to this guy.
This is when I private messaged Lion to ask him to explain and double check his/my math so he is not short changing people. He starts off by saying be bought 377k UTK. He then later says he bought $18,839 (67 ETH) worth which works out to around 470k UTK, dude cant do simple math or get his story straight.
We can see him making up random numbers in the chat moments before he banned me.
Both of which would mean the eth price would have had to have been under $250. So for these numbers to add up he purchased UTK for the fund at over 8 cents each. Higher than even the non discounted price.
He then tries to claim it was our mistake to think he bought 33%.
He banned me about 10 minutes later so I was lucky enough to screen shot it all, and I believe this is the reason he banned me, to deny me access to screen shots of him making up random numbers.
I now see he is claiming he only bought 210k tokens for the fund or $10,000 UTK. That would probably add up to around 14 cents per UTK or more more.
I am totally fine with Lion saying he can get a deal and pretending he bought the tokens. He was offering a better deal than original deal. But when the deal turns into a worse deal that is not acceptable.
UTK is now at almost 17x (at the time of writing). So really lion should be paying out the fund people around 8-9x+ because just off UTK alone at 33% of the fund it would be 5.7x. BTC went 3-4x and lets pretend mingo did nothing. (UTK eventually went 27x over the next few weeks and lion still had not paid anyone out).
He is also trying to rip people off with the price he states for mingo. He said many many times he bought 15% of the fund for mingo which would be around 8-9k and if you do the math its correct as we can see how many mingo he received back. He would have spent exactly 15 Eth to get 187,000 mingo. I know this because I also bought mingo at exactly the same time. Mingo was purchased on the 25/26th September. Eth was 291 USD on this day. So actually he bought 4,300 USD worth. But remember he told me in chat 8k on mingo. He just makes numbers up but I already caught him in the lie, he bought exactly 30 eth worth which is $8600 which he admitted to already to me already. Though this is not really important, it just shows he can't get his story straight.
It is in two transactions so that is a bit odd. He could claim the second transaction was the funds mingo as but that is only 10 eths worth and only wroth $2,910
There is 33 ETH left in the fund account. He is not refunding that to anyone. (update eventually after months he did use up most of that to refund secret coin members)
To what extent is he ripping people off.
Think about this. People in the fund and bounty receivers total stand to gain around 600-800k total payout including everything (if the fund bought at 33%). Lion gained around 6 million dollars or more (if he sold at the top, for a pro trader he did poorly on that selling almost nothing and it has gone from $1.30 to 20 cents) for doing sweet fuck all. He probably spent less than an honest week or twos work advising utrust and setting up the fund and we all know he used the group to get advice and was also getting advice from Toth who he had promised 1 million UTK as his share of the advisor tokens.
He later dropped that to 500k becuase of the burn. Sounds reasonable, then 375k, because he is lion. He then proceeded to lie directly to Toth's face for 2 weeks while he had 5.75 million coins sitting in his wallet saying he didn't have them yet. This is sad as they were originally friends as far as Lion was concerned.
The reason I said 600-800k because lion promised many bounties to people including myself, to promote utrust and this is the reason Lion was able to broker his free tokens.
He made the deals with people they should be honored. All I was trying to do was talk lion into honoring his deal. If he had tried to shaft people 10-15% I probably would not have said something and let it go, but 50-60%+, not cool.
I personally had a very small stake in the fund and only bought in to really keep an eye on Lion and stay in his good books. Same reason I joined members group. I really didn't see the point of it but I wanted to see what he was doing as I had seen many dodgy things from Lion.
Lion offered 100 UTK per active person that we bring over to slack. Brandon bought all sorts of people over and did a good job. I personally waited over a month before I bought anyone into the group as I was very wary of Lion. I posted on my personal facebook group and even said about the UTK bounty.
I bought 127 users across, only 30 of which became active. Lion said from the start I could keep 30 and give out 70 or whatever I wanted and I told him I would probably just give out all 100.
It actually turned out to be quite a bit of work tracking and tracing who was active and who joined etc. But nothing more than probably 3-4 hours total.
When lion offered bounties for promoting utrust on Social media site he said there was a chunk of Utrust to share with anyone that promotes. Myself Brandon and markpeo were the standout promoters and lion posted a three way split between us.
This is where the conflict between Brandon and I happened and I dont think it needs to be talked about and is sorted now.
Both mark and I disagreed with Lions 3 way split as there were at least 8 people we saw doing a very good job and honestly Brandon made a few logos an did a decent job but his presence wasn't really that much higher than others, it was all perceived and if you did the metrics on views and likes it was obvious.
Both mark and I agreed we would share our bonus with the others regardless of if Brandon did or not and we did not think he should or shouldn't.
I said to Lion he has the chance to make good and that "I could be wrong lets both sleep on it. I was at a mates house trying to play computer games and drinking beer. Wasn't really the ideal time to talk."
Instead he decided to post this and ban me.
The Lies
So we can see Lion lie to members of secret coin over and over about tokens and price and what is going on. He is actually not very smart at all because it was all in etherscan bright as day. Other people had messaged me after looking for 5 minutes and could see what I saw.
Brand was the first to be paid out any bounty all while Lion was telling everyone he had no coins and would pay out of his own pocket. I know exactly when Brandon got paid and how much because hes an exhibitionist. He posted on facebook he made 65k in one day. That lined up exactly with a transaction made by lion to Brandon for 75k UTK. At the time it was worth only $4000 when lion made the bounty promise.
He 100% deserves it. But all the while Lion was telling others that did just as much work or were promised bounties there is no tokens yet he kept quite and let everyone else suffer. He also lied and told another member he got 25k tokens not 75k.
Brandon Celebrating
Originally I was going to leave this part about Brandon out. As I mostly like Brandon. But he kept secrets from the group to benefit himself and protect Lion and just today he is still talking about how he turned 25k UTK into 100k UTK when its just not true.
When I messaged Lion and accused him, I knew beforehand I would be banned. I was messaging with several people and said I am probably going to get banned. So at this point I gave up my share of the supposed bounty we were getting (probably 25k worth) .. I was also promised around another 3-4000 for reviews and being first to join members channel etc etc. At this stage UTK was at 10x. I was well aware I was giving up $20,000-30,000 worth of bounties, also knew Lion would not refund my membership fee and I also knew he would not pay me out for the fund. So all up probably $40k but at the time of writing where the fund has not been paid out that would be more like $50,000. UTK eventually went to 27x also.
It was worth it, and if I had kept my mouth shut it would have probably played out even worse and still no bounties paid. I cant stand liars and thieves. I actually assumed he might do a runner or not pay anyone out at all.
In the end I think its greed that made him stick around. I know he would 100% have been offering people backdoor deals to Lana ICO. And he would have tried to pull the same shit with Lana.
I was actually more worried about him ruining the community he started but we built, other than his manic posts it was an amazing community that has now moved onto better things.
Below is screen shots all the times Lion chopped and changed his story
I tried to get lion to explain his actions but he just kept changing his story and just making stuff up.
The whole channel agreed we sell BQX at 83 cents on a certain date. Easy right? Send BQX to binance. Sell it get a total BTC or total eth back, it went to binance 77 days ago ( (at the time of writing) the date we were told it sold) but was only sold 30 days ago. This doesn't really matter but its still dodgy behavior.
Lion kept it in BTC. approx 10 BTC. the price of BTC on this date was around $5,700 and is now around three times that. This should have been converted to ETH as promised.
Total lion got 5.75 million utrust. It all came from the dashboard address and probably was all in there from the very start and he just picked and chose when to remove it to make it look like his stories were matching.
Another two million UTK to lions personal account from the dashboard.
Some extra screenshots of all the lies etc he told 10 minutes before I got banned.
I ask him to reconsider lying to people. He banned me instead.
Here he tries to make up the numbers again. First he claims he bought 377K UTK then all sorts fo random numbers.
Explaining the total should be 180 ETH minimum.
My math is bit wrong in the screenshot but not the result. It should be based on his own screenshots he sent me 183-200 ETH just for the BQX sold he ranges from 83 censt to 87 cents. So total eth should be 183+52. Divide that by 3 (for 33% of fund) = 22k that would be 500-550 UTK. I did all the math correctly in my head but typed it out wrong except for the result which was correct. Here he is trying to say he sold BQX and only got 23 eth.
Better math. Again he confirms 377k BOUGHT .. you didnt buy shit you lieing sack of shit. Show us the transaction then.
Even more proof. He basically admits to selling the BQX at 80cents to 1$ so he can't get out of that one and he is forced to admit this. He later says he kept the proceeds in BTC.
ETh fund with 30 eth left when most of it should have been spent.
Lion is bonkers trying to justify his retarded math. I could solve that for him in about 1 second
Lion justifies cutting me out form the fund also lies about using personal money and personal cost to himself to buy the coins for the fund. What he is trying to say he he doesn't have any coins in his wallet yet so he had to buy them off the exchange. Why would he buy them to turn around and sell them again?
Lions personal account and UTK transactions
Link to the BQX etherscan. Shows he sent them out 77 days ago and was supposed to sell them. He actually sold them only 33 days ago. This is not really a big deal but its another lie. And if they price of BQX had dropped he may have claimed he sold them lower.
Remember lion all of his tokens for US doing all the work. Initially he was getting 5 mill bounty claimed it got cut in half because of burn, is possible.
If he could post his UTK dashboard it would go a long way. He won't.
The payout to the secret coin group
So this brings us to the refund. It was supposed to be paid out after 48 hours, so far it has been twice that and no refund given. (it took around three weeks extra in the end)
Going by his calculations the amount of UTK he "purchased" for the fund which is obviously a number he just made up in his head is around 14.4% of the total fiat, not 33% which was stated by Lion several times to be the amount we invested from the fund.
The mistakes he made were leaving the fund in BTC instead of converting it to eth. That lost around 200% of the gain on that part which was never invested .. but that is crystal ball stuff and could have easily gone the other way so I think that is totally fine, though he may have converted it who knows. But that was what the whole fund agreed to do when selling BQX to simplify and have the whole fund in ETH.
62980 x 0.87 = $54,994 This number matches up in BTC value.
Total $69,327.65 and he spent 10k on utrust so that is 14.4%.
At 33% he would have spent $22877.91 a number I worked out earlier. Remember though he also told me he spent around 18,839 USD on utrust? (28%) as per the screenshot. So we know he is just making stuff up.
Total profits at 33% would have been $642,092.06 instead of 371,656
At 14.4% invested the total return is around 5.35x in fiat price.
At 33% invested teh total return would have been around 9.2x in fiat price.
There is no reason to list the total return on the original eth price. That would be a 4-4.5x gain just staying in ETH, no one cares.
If lion makes good on his payout he is paying out around 5x on the fiat value of the fund. IF you had purchased UTK yourself you would have got 21x.
In simple terms he is stealing 271,000 from the fund by making up whatever numbers he likes. If he had gone with his initial 50% in UTK value even more. But people were reasonably happy with 33% after the idea most of them had he would not return anything to them.
His reasons for changing the value are not valid. He should have asked the fund or told the fund.
There is nothing complicated there. Lion is a thieving cunt. (sorry there is just no other word that works here).
Final thoughts.
At the end of the day lion used our group and our groups buying power and PR power to get his deal with UTK and gain 5.75 million tokens.
That I really don't care about. Happy for him to get his payday. The fact he is ripping people off and claiming hardship and lying at every step of the way and stealing every little cent of peoples hard earned and well deserved money tells me exactly what kind of person he is.
Most of you would have suspected this for a long time. Most of those that invested did so knowing this might happen, so they had already considered that a possibility and it was fun money for most of us. But for a few it was not.
Lion claims to be losing 150-200k personal cost. First he claims he bought the tokens with ETH, 10k worth. Then he is saying he bought them off exchange?? I dunno how someone is so bad at lieing. We all knew the second he got his tokens in his wallet.
Other not so fun things about Lion.
Toth's Role in all this
I have spoken extensively to Toth for months before this all happened. I believe Lion lied to Toth all of the way through the process. Lion had Toth by the balls as Toth had invested very large amounts in various things through lions special deals. If he was to reveal anything Lion would likely just steal his money. Toth had nothing to do with the Fund and advised against it.
Lion has been telling Toth for weeks he has no UTK tokens. He finally admitted to receiving adviser tokens. He Promised Toth 500k advisor tokens because Toth was co advising for utrust. (initially 1m but halved because of the burn, but we don't know if this is another lie or not). He again lowered Toths advisor tokens to 375K for an unknown reason. After two weeks of the tokens (both bounty and advisor) sitting there and Lion making up stories this is when Toth exposed Lion on Slack.
I have been keeping tabs on lion since almost the day I joined this slack as I have caught him in several lies and half truths.
Why did he eventually pay out?
I made threat to expose him to Lana for breaking his NDA. He had invested around 100 BTC with Lana way back when he first found them. When BTC was worth around $4000. It was a bluff and it worked.
Breach of NDA is grounds for them to nullify his contract and essentially keep his BTC and not give him tokens. This scared him. Also the threat of exposing his true identity. This scared him. Eventually his true identity got posted on slack and this scared him even more.
I truly believe he planned to run away with the money before this and all the delays was just lead up to this. His hand needed forcing. He has since deleted most of his online presence including his own business webpage.
Truly I have to thank Toth and several others who will remain anonymous for providing the inside scoop on Lions lies and scams otherwise I believe he would have ripped people off even further and possibly only returned what was invested. As it turned out that is basically what most people got back in the end anyways. In the case of BQX they would have been better staying in that. Again not the crypto Genius he claims to be as everyone but him believed BQX would go crazy again. It went over 30x from when people in the fund sent him BQX. ETh around 5x. He paid out 5.2x.
It has to be noted, Lion also has not paid out a handful of people. He did give me back around 2 ETH as part of my threats to expose him to Lana ICO. There were people in the fund that didn't meet his deadline to put their mew address into his spreadsheet. Those people got nothing back, even though Lion has their original wallet address from which they paid as we all provided it when joining the fund.
There is still at least 7 or so people he has not refunded for the membership fee, this appears to be random, as many of those people have still been in contact with him and are yet to get their refunds. Though some have.
Who is Lion?
He tried to stay anonymous and hide who he was. This was another red flag.
With all the little details about himself he has let slip as well as the details he has let slip to other people, people were able to figure out his real name. After others said they have figured out his real name from google others found him even easier.
I was able to confirm it was him as the video he made of Lana ICO caught his reflection in a mirror.
People also found his phone number and real home address.
What now?
An individual has a lawsuit against Cameron as Cameron refuses to be reasonable and just told lies in the face of facts.
There is still an option to bring a class action lawsuit against Lion as he ran the secret coin fund illegally as a fund with set level returns rather than buying tokens for others and either returning those tokens to the buyers or converting them to another coin before returned for convenience.
Most people would rather move on. But the fact people are still unpaid is annoying and no bounties were paid. Except 75k to Brandon and 25k to Markpeo.
Bounties were offered for many things.
Inviting new people to his group. Making UTK content. Promoting content, reviews, blogs, slack etc. Social media campaign. Translations and Moderation Campaign. Signatures and Avatars. The same bounties offered by Utrust. All were supposed to be distributed by Lion.
Plus many other things that he promised such as free UTK for joining a paid group run by him.
They ranged from 100 UTK to 50,000 UTK. Which was later halved because of the burn.
He lied for 2 weeks saying Nuno is always unavailable or unreachable/drunk and he won't send the tokens, but we could see the tokens sitting in his wallet.
So out of either 2 million bounty or 3.75 million bounty we don't know which was for advising. Only 100k tokens were distributed.
It is worth noting Markpeo contacted all the people he could remember and shared his 25k UTK with the main promoters of Utrust. He only kept 4000 UTK for himself.
This brings me to Maximus. Who doesn't like Maximus? I did and still do, but I can't trust him anymore. He is clearly very much on Lions side and truly not someone I can trust. I confided in Maximus about Lion a few times and I suspect he passed those private conversations on.
I also believe he passed information to Lion others didn't want him knowing.
I also provided Max with all the information he needed to find out exactly what I found out. In fact I spoon fed him. He played dumb and ignored all the warnings and I believe got himself caught between a rock and a hard place.
I believe he got tricked and ended up on the wrong side and there was nothing he could do about it in the end.
I feel sorry for Max as he is a good guy and really got duped. He has shown he is still willing to do Lions bidding. Trying to shill a new ICO Lion is involved with. I won't talk about the ICO here but stay away.
There was one more UTK payment made from Lion in bounty. Guess who?
Maximus. This was very recent and just shows Max is only looking after himself. Which is fine, he is one of many people that deserved a bounty for the promotional work he did.
Max was one of the people Mark shared his UTK bounty with, as both Mark and I noted Maximus as a person that contributed heavily to promoting UTK.
But why keep it a secret and not repay the kindness Mark gave to him? It has been weeks since he received his blood money.
Utrust and Nuno
Cryptolion was an unofficial invisible advisor for Utrust. He had secret deals directly with Nuno and had direct contact with Nuno. We know this as he would provide inside information to a small group of people before it was made official. He used this info to get people to trust him.
Nuno was under the impression Lion would distribute all the bounty if the job was done. Our community completed the job. We contacted Nuno about this scam and he promised he would would look into it and get back to us.
We sent a very detailed account of what transpired to Nuno, including proof no tokens had been distributed as you can see them all still sitting in lions wallet. He promised to get to the bottom of it as all of the bounty should have been distributed.
That was over a month ago and Nuno has stopped even reading our messages. The last contact we got from Nuno was more promises and him saying he had contacted Cameron to ask him. That exact same day Cameron started moving his UTK to several new wallet addresses, I assume in a attempt to hide something. He really doesn't understand how visible the blockchain is.
I will give Nuno the benefit of the doubt that he is still investigating for now and will not release the info I provided him or our conversations as they were private, yet. Others have contacted Nuno and he is talking to them but I doubt he cares or will do anything.
I believe the way Utrust gave bounties directly to the community managers with no recourse if they ran away with the tokens doesn't make sense. They should have a signed document with those managers.
Please note this is a very rough copy as I just cant devote any more time to it.
It took me over a month to compile all this information and use it to get Cameron to pay back at least a portion of what he owed. And the saga stretched on for another month. During this time I did less than 2 crypto trades and purchases.