I uncovered a $500 million Ponzi scheme, and by the end of this three-part series, we will expose offshore money fraud and confront the man behind it all. Yeah, I get arrested, and then what? I win, because they're dead.
But before we do that, let's start at the beginning. After my Logan Paul investigation, I was bored, and I'd been drinking a little too much. That's it, coffee. I'm cutting you off. You've had way too much.
Why? That should provide you a point of reference. However, the truth was I just needed a new case. I woke up hungover with a text about something called Traders Domain.
I hadn't heard of it. This person told me that a lot of people and celebrities had their money locked up in it. And they were hoping it wasn't all gone.
I decided it was the perfect case to get back in the game. It's time to investigate Trader's Domain. All right, back in the $10 million studio, I've got their website pulled up here.
And it says they're going to maximize your financial potential and claim that in three years, they made returns of 473,000%. According to their website, they do this by being a Forex broker, which is fine. But what's strange is that they're an offshore company, which means technically they can't serve U.S. investors if they wanted to because they're located in St. Vincent, which is unregulated. But if that's the case, how did our friend here even get involved?
And what he told me was this, quote, Brandon is who brought me into the fund. These are the sponsors. But of course, that begs the question, who is Brandon Sims and what is a sponsor?
Well, we're going to go to the conspiracy board because I can tell it's going to get complicated to see what we're working with. So far, we have an investor going into Trader's Domain through Brandon Sims. But where does the money go?
Well, I asked. And what he told me was this. It didn't go offshore at all to Trader's Domain. It went to a company called Seacap Holdings LLC in the United States.
We'll add that as well. Now, if that wasn't weird enough, in addition, Brandon wanted to hide what the money was even for that was invested. He's told our investor this, don't put investment in MIMO, just put services for you.
Now, this is where things get weird because it turns out CCAP Holdings isn't owned by Brandon Sims at all. It's also not owned by Traders Domain. It's owned by a man named Tim Tran.
Now, when you look up who Tin Tran is, he's basically a ghost. There's essentially only one article about him, about him running a weed growing operation, which he was arrested for. So what exactly is going on here? Well, to find out, I got a couple calls with two TV celebrities who said they put money in Trader's domain and lost it as well, and hopefully they can help us figure this out.
My name is Pace Morby and I lost $950,000 in Trader's Domain. Hi, my name is Jamil Damji. I invested a million dollars into Trader's Domain. I have never taken a withdrawal out and I've lost all million dollars. And I wanted to ask how these two got involved with Trader's Domain.
So I come to learn of this opportunity, this investment opportunity at a mastermind in Miami, Florida. I was invited there by Pete Vargas, who is on Grant Cardone's team. Pete Vargas. came to me and said, hey, I've got this thing that I'm making really good money on, and you and Jamil should get involved.
And this is where we meet the individual by the name of Holton Buggs. They showed me their accounts, and they're like, look at this. We're pulling money in every single month. Look at this. Look at this.
Look at this. He gets into this incredible story of millions of dollars of profits that he's been able to make in the world of day trading, and shows us some accounts. Some of these accounts had phenomenal, like just mind bending balances in it. One of them was over $80 million. There was another account that he showed us that had over $650 million.
He had said that someone had offered him $650 million to buy his trading bot. Apparently this bot was the, you know, incredible technology that was making these fantastic returns. And the bot never had a losing day. But he's showing us the software. It's not just screenshots.
It's like. actual software that I've never seen before. And it's called Trader's Domain. I make a decision that I would invest initially $500,000.
I talked to Holton and his team and they send me wire instructions and on those wire instructions, I am implicitly and very specifically told, you know, how to send the wire, who to send the wire to, what to write in the memo. Now, what I found interesting about this is despite this being a new sponsor, look at who they're sending money to. Once again, CCAP Holdings through Holton Bugs this time. We'll put him on the board as well. From what I can tell online, he's a small-time MLM promoter.
My goal was to share with them how to properly use the Lamborghini. Look at the purpose of the wire that was sent again. Once again, it says services, not investment, which is exactly what Brandon Sims instructed his clients to do as well. And this is where I was confused because the more people I talked to, the more it felt like everyone kind of had the same story. Take another sponsor I found for Trader's Domain, which I found from our first source once again, Mike Sims.
Now, he claims Trader's Domain was his hedge fund. I've invested in your hedge fund. Correct.
Yes, but it's so crazy. I'm just learning what it is, only because when you started talking about it, I didn't understand it, but I trusted it only because... I trusted your company and I trusted all the other people that invested on my friends.
And it was like a little fear of loss. Like, yo, y'all not going to get this bro. So hedge fund.
I'm up 60%, which is in, what is it? Maybe two months, month and a half. Which is crazy.
It's nuts. And then, like I said, that's one of the quote, unquote, higher risk strategies. So it is higher risk?
It is. But y'all haven't lost a man long. We haven't.
There are losing days. But no losing months. Now this all sounds great.
And according to leaked texts from Mike's assistant, we find out that these investment accounts people are putting in look identical to the ones on Trader's Domain. So it doesn't take a genius to figure out Mike Sims is putting some people's money into Trader's Domain and it looks like he's claiming it's his hedge fund. But how could that be if Holton Bugg says it's his trading bot?
And still yet another sponsor for Trader's Domain called Goldbridge said they were following a master trader. This is Goldbridge. We've said that our protocol mirrors the results of a master trader.
And to this day, we haven't had a red day. This is real stuff. We're not using new capital, you know, to pay off the old investors like there's there's no Ponzi.
Ah, yes. Nothing says it's not a Ponzi scheme like saying, hey, guys. This is not a Ponzi scheme. Now, of course, I went ahead and put everyone on the board here, but the more people I talked to, just the more confusing it got.
Like, who's running this thing? And what is it? Is Trader's Domain a hedge fund? Is it Forex?
Is it a bot? What's going on? Seems like not even the investors know.
He said, like, it's a bot that they're using to trade gold. Very credible. Wall Street trader.
Done this for a long time. An experienced trader. who had built a large network, made a lot of money for people that I knew and personally trusted. It really feels like the more sponsors that I find, the more confusing it's getting.
And the details, even when they seem to line up, always slightly varied. For example, if you put in your money with Alex Santee of Centurion Capital, they said they were going to use an expert advisor trading bot, which might sound similar to Algo Capital, another sponsor. who said they were using a trading bot as well, but with a twist. I thought, yeah, basically they described it as a bot that was configured with settings. They had it down where they would win like almost all the time.
And there was a master trader overseeing the bots. So this time there's another master trader involved. I mean, trying to find the truth feels like I'm trying to grab smoke or something. Every time I thought I understood what was going on, I'd hear a new story.
I even found one about. NFTs. They said they were investing in NFTs, but really the money was just getting siphoned off to traders domain.
And part of the reason I'm going through all these examples with you is to show you the absolute insanity of this. Everybody's feeding money into the same place, all under different reasons with different stories, but they did have one thing in common. You see everybody.
was making lots of money and getting very rich with Trader's Domain, at least at first. When I meet dozens of people, all of whom have been in this platform for over a year, all of whom are saying that they pulled out more than their principal. Those people have unbelievable stories of like, yeah, I've made this much money. I've done this much. I've pulled this out.
And not just stories, but like, hey, yeah, here's my bank account. I got a wire two months ago. So my brother started with 10 grand. And with that 10 grand, it took him, bro, he's made way over $100,000.
But bro, all the way up to like last October, he's been able to cash out. No problem, man. He's quadrupled, made so much out of this, made profit. And this is the reason people were throwing their money into Trader's Domain.
They saw their friends and family getting paid out legitimately. But like all good things, that came to an end. Over time, payments started to get delayed and people started noticing something odd.
The only time he noticed that it started slowing down was in October where they started telling about the 20 days, but it took him more than 20 days. And so what ends up happening is one day we're looking at our phones and all of a sudden we're losing. And we're not just losing a little bit.
Our accounts are on drawdown like 50%. And then Pace calls me. He's like, ah, this is where the rug gets pulled out from underneath us, man.
I felt like something was wrong and I feel like this is where the rug is going to get pulled out from underneath us. It felt like that day I was feeling sick. I'm like, man, I.
Damn it, we got scammed. And then all of a sudden, everything magically got erased. And they said, oh, the server's refreshed. We had to refresh the servers.
Like, that somehow changed all the trades. They said, no, it's the aggregator. The way the aggregator communicates from the platform to MetaTrader 5, the data gets scrambled, and then it gets screwed up for the whole day.
And then by the end of the day, I actually made money. He just changed the trades. He just changed the exit dollar amount that he took on that trade. Now, this was alarming. Trades can't change after the fact.
Losses don't just magically become profits. That's impossible. And people were confused. Why were their withdrawals getting delayed if they were still making money?
And that's when people started to panic withdrawal. They wanted their money out. And this is when things went from bad to worse. Because payments...
stopped coming altogether. And the CFTC issued a red list for traders'domain for, quote, accepting funds from U.S. customers, which, as we said, is illegal. And a few months later, as I'm investigating this, an official investigation is announced as well. Quote, CFTC charges several people and companies in a $145 million Ponzi scheme.
And in that report, they name somebody we know. Tin Tran, the owner of CCAP Holdings. According to this document, Tin Tran, quote, operated a fraudulent scheme from approximately April 2020 to the present.
He directly accepted at least $144 million from approximately 913 pool participants. Not only that, we also see another familiar face, Mike Sims, or Michael Shannon Sims, who is also mentioned as one of the promoters. So I guess at this point, you're probably wondering, well, hey, look. I guess they caught him, right? Case closed.
And that's what I thought too. But just as I was ready to give this whole case up, I started to hear a different name that changed everything. Something happened in November or October and people just stopped getting money back. Nobody's communicating with us. Nothing's happening.
Everybody that's involved keeps telling us that we're ungrateful and that we're asking too many questions. And I told Jamil in like first week of January, I said, we got scammed, man. These guys must be running a Ponzi scheme or something's going on. I started doing my own research about who the company, what the company is, who the owner behind it, team behind it, audit team behind it.
And that's when I find out there's this one guy named Ted who's making all the trades and he's running this Ponzi scheme. We now learn of this savant that is the man behind traders domain. And so this is the first time I ever hear the name Ted Safranco. And I'm like, who the freak is Ted? Who's Ted?
Coffeezilla, I don't think he's ever dealt with someone my size before. And nobody knows anything about his family because they don't have the resources I have. It took me weeks to go through all the documents.
But, eventually, a pattern started to emerge. Hi everyone, my name is Ted. I've been working for many years now, almost 15 years.
I wanted to have a lifestyle change. I wanted to get into something different. I mean, this is sociopathic behavior, right? This is what a real sociopath does.
Give me a fing break. I'd take a flight to the UK right now and just fing show up and curb stomp their heads. I win, because they're dead.