Adding to the concern for the legitimacy of Tether, is that they have also previously claimed all the way up until 2018 that their reserves were subject to frequent professional audits. This is patently false. There had not been a single independent audit conducted on Tethers reserves up until 2020, which was conducted by a less than legitimate agency housed in the Cayman Islands.

Phil Potter, the co-founder and former Chief Strategy Officer of Tether publicly stated that the reason no one would conduct on audit on Tether was because they couldn’t find an agency willing to go through with one.

Potter stated on a recorded phone call that:

“no one wanted to touch it [Tether]… because of the negativity and uncertainty [surrounding crypto]”

Potter instead, gave his word that “the dollars are all there” in place of official inquiry.

But if you were to spend a little over 10 seconds Googling this statement, you can find that Potter’s claim that he couldn’t find anyone willing to conduct an audit is just a pale-faced lie. Tether did, in fact, have an agency called Friedman LLP who were willing to conduct an audit back in 2018.

What happened with this audit you ask? Well, Tether refused to continue cooperating with Friedman due to the:

“excruciatingly detailed procedures Friedman were undertaking”

That’s right. Tether fired their own auditor on the grounds that they were being too thorough and were asking for too much information…

They were fired for doing their job.

This information alone should be enough to make anyone extremely sceptical about Tether, but the horrible truth is, we’re only just getting started. To make matters, much, much worse, it turns out that the founders of Tether (basically a personal money printer at this point) are not only heavily associated with a crypto exchange called Bitfinex, but they’ve also been lying about their relationship for years.

So what’s the big issue with Tether and Bitfinex being in cahoots?

Well, as exposed by anonymous Twitter user Bitfinex’ed: Bitfinex is a crypto exchange just like Binance or Coinbase that were the primary exchange that Tether was used in the early days of Tether’s existence. Now, if an organisation like Tether is on the inside of Bitfinex with little to no regulatory bodies overseeing purchases, it means that Tether could very well be creating new Tether’s (which are always worth a dollar) out of thin air, using it to buy real cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and Ethereum and then using that to back said Tethers. This creates an enormous amount of real cash out of absolutely nowhere.

I totally understand that this all sounds like a tin-foil hat, QAnon conspiracy to be running with, but there’s extremely good reason to believe that all of this is completely true.

Once again, Tether co-founder Phil Potter has been caught red-handed, actively lying about the relationship between Tether and Bitfinex.

He initially stated that Tether and Bitfinex aren’t owned by the same people or have any real relationship together, offering instead that:

“We bank with the same banks…”

It was revealed in the Paradise Papers leak of 2017 that Tether and Bitfinex weren’t just working together, rather, they are in fact owned by the same people, namely: Phil Potter & Giancarlo Devasini (Tether and Bitfinex’s Chief Financial Officer).

So, if these guys co-own both Bitfinex; a massive crypto exchange, and Tether; the most highly traded asset in the cryptocurrency market, how trustworthy are they really?

This is where, professional fraud investigator, Bennett Tomlin who appeared on a Youtube Video by fraud-buster Coffeezilla comes in extremely handy. He is currently writing a book on Tether’s unsavoury origin story and provides unique and damning insight into their founding members.

Just try to keep your jaw off the floor as you read on, things get very disturbing, very quickly.

The Founding Fathers: A Gang of Convicted Sex Offenders, Fraudsters, and Exiles

Let’s start with Bitfinex. Bitfinex was founded in 2013 by Raphael Nicole. He was a help-desk technician before founding Bitfinex and spent the majority of his time scouring BitcoinTalk, a popular bitcoin forum, for fraudulent crypto schemes to participate in.

Raphael lost a good deal of his Bitcoin in the Trendon Shavers Ponzi scheme which was brought down by the Department of Justice. After this he attempted to start his own “high yield lending program” where other crypto holders would lend him their Bitcoin and he would use “arbitrage” to earn these holders 2% a week.

After he received little to no interest in this program because it was so obviously a Ponzi scheme, he then decided to start Bitfinex…

He was then quickly joined at Bitfinex by Giancarlo Devasini, now the CFO at both Bitfinex and Tether. In 1996, Giancarlo Devasini was busted for selling pirated Microsoft software and was ordered to pay US$65,000 in fines.

Next to join Bitfinex was Phil G Potter the former CSO of both Tether & Bitfinex, who was publicly humiliated when fired from Morgan Stanley after bragging about wearing expensive custom suits, a $3,500 Rolex, and spending thousands of dollars on lavish dinners in a New York Times article.

Now, let’s turn our attention to the very strange crew that founded Tether.

Tether was originally founded as ‘RealCoin’ in 2014 by Brock Pierce, Craig Sellars and Reeve Collins. Brock Pierce was a child actor, known notably for his role in Mighty Ducks. He’s now more well-known for fleeing to Spain with known child sexual predator Marc Collins Rector where both of them were tracked down by authorities and arrested in a house filled with child pornography.

RealCoin was bought out by Bitfinex in 2014 and was renamed Tether. Both companies then shared the same executive team, a fact that was actively covered up by all of its members. The Tether / Bitfinex team was then joined by Paolo Ardoino in 2015. He was employed as a Fintech developer, however it was later discovered that Paolo was previously a director of Delchain, a crypto-oriented branch of Deltec Bank, the same bank that now services Bitfinex & Tether.

Moving further down the ladder of incrimination: the Bitfinex / Tether team was later joined by now General Counsel: Stuart Hoegner. Hoegner was the director of compliance for the parent company of Ultimate Bet, an online poker company that was rocked by a scandal in which it allow some players (obviously affiliated with Ultimate Bet) to see the cards of other players, effectively rendering it impossible for them to lose. Hoegner left the company shortly after this was exposed.

All of these people that we have just learned about are the core constituents that holds together the largest provider of liquidity and purchasing in the entire crypto market. They hold the keys to this and the 64 billion dollars of capital associated with it.

More Lies

Now, you might be thinking that this is more than enough information for you to be deeply and resolutely concerned with the legitimacy of Tether and the stability of the entire crypto market. Well, luckily for us, there’s more.

All of this was initially exposed by Bitfinex’ed who disclosed in an interview with Coffeezilla that he initially noticed something was fishy in March 2017, during a lawsuit between Tether and Wells Fargo.

In the proceedings it was revealed that Tether & Bitfinex actually didn’t have any official banking services at all, despite this they continued issuing tens of millions of dollars of Tether despite being unable to take transfers.

In response to pressure applied by Bitfinex’ed they applied for a financial attestation, which looks a lot like an audit but is actually just an incredibly quick glance at a bank account by a third party to verify the number of dollars in said account. Now, this is where things start to get very, very shady.

It was discovered further down the line by Letitia James, an Attorney General for the State of New York that Tether had convinced Friedman LLP, the third party that conducted the attestation to look into their account at Noble Bank on an extremely specific day at an extremely specific time: at 8pm on the 15th of September 2015.

On the 14th of September 2015, quite literally the day before, Tether did not even have an account with Noble Bank. On the morning of September 15, 2015, they opened an account with Noble Bank. Just moments later on the very same morning, Bitfinex transferred $382 million into the Noble Bank account from their own private holdings.

The attestation was conducted at 8 o’clock that evening. No one from Friedman knew that both the bank account and the resultant funds had only been summoned into existence that same morning.

Adding fuel to the suspicion fire, the price of Bitcoin fell by over 40% in the two weeks leading up to the date of the attestation, suggesting that insiders at Bitfinex were selling boat loads of Bitcoin to provide the $380 million they needed to prove that Tether was “backed”. Just hours after the attestation was released, the largest 4 hours of buying in the history of Bitcoin occurred, alluding to the fact that the Bitfinex team were busy buying back all of their Bitcoin now that they had proved to their customers that Tether was “legitimate”.

Bitfinex Goes Gangbusters

You’d think we could wrap it up there and just call it a day right? Surely there’s just not enough hours in the day for Tether and Bitfinex to keep getting up to more corrupt, criminal and collusive behaviour, right?

Wrong.

The next scandal occurred in the months following the attestation. It’s safe to say that Bitfinex had issues with their banking model. They were getting too large to remain financially unserviced and desperately needed an actual institution to bank with.

Now in the world of crypto it can be hard for exchanges and companies to find banks that will deal with cryptocurrency because of valid fears of money laundering within crypto exchanges. Couple that with the fact that the boys from Bitfinex also have a history plagued by shady misdealing and you’ve got yourself a case of: “hard to find a bank that will trust you”.

So, they decide to bank with Crypto Capital, an off-shore Panamanian “bank” that dealt exclusively with cryptocurrency and had plenty of ties to some major players in the world of organised crime, namely: international drug cartels.

Anyways, Bitfinex and Crypto Capital began working together. Bitfinex used Crypto Capital to bank approximately $850 million in client’s funds. Crypto Capital were later, unsurprisingly, busted for their involvement in an illegal escort website called Backpage along with a long list of other unsavoury clients.

Long story short, the Feds came in and froze the entirety of Crypto Capital’s assets, immediately separating Bitfinex from 80% of their total funds… This should have spelled the end for the Bitfinex. There’s no way they could have continued their services and undertaken withdrawals for clients with an 800-million-dollar hole in their finances.

Well, instead of declaring bankruptcy and going bust like any other crypto exchange would have, they had a unique advantage. They weren’t just a lone wolf exchange, Bitfinex had hundreds of millions of dollars of reserves in Tether just sitting there. So, they decided to dip into those reserves: to the tune of 400 million dollars.

They could now continue servicing clients and conducting business like normal. In the face of vast media criticism, they had to prove that they were in fact “not insolvent”.

This is where they choose to bank with Deltec, which we learned before; founding member Paolo Ardoino was formerly a director. Deltec provides an attestation on November 1, 2018: “proving” that Tether does in fact have the funds necessary to be backed at a ratio of 1:1.

However, immediately after this attestation was made public by an announcement from Deltec, on November 2, 2018, Tether then paid Bitfinex a sum total of $475 million to help fill the gaps in Bitfinex’s balance sheet. This means that Tether is now once again, completely unbacked. Obviously, now lacking the requisite funds ($475 million) to be backed 1:1, Tether made a fundamental shift in their public policy about how Tether was to be backed. This was mentioned in the infographic was above with a little red flag and an arrow pointing to it, but I’ll re-share the important part below:

So, What Has All of This Led to?

Well, as of the 23rd of February 2021, it ultimately resulted in the Attorney General of the State of New York, after 2 years of investigation stating the following:

“Bitfinex and Tether recklessly and unlawfully covered-up massive financial losses to keep their scheme going and protect their bottom lines. Tether’s claims that its virtual currency was fully backed by U.S. dollars at all times was a lie. These companies obscured the true risk investors faced and were operated by unlicensed and unregulated entities dealing in the darkest corners of the financial system.”

As settlement they were fined $18.5 million dollars and were banned from practice in New York. Now, you’d think that Tether wouldn’t be able to just brush this off and keep on keepin’ on, right? Again…

Wrong.

General Counsel: Stuart Hoegner wrote in a publicly available statement (now altered) on Tether’s website that:

“The New York Attorney General’s Office made no negative findings whatsoever that tethers were not fully backed nor were ever issued without backing, or for the purpose of manipulating crypto markets.”

This is once again, a pale-faced and blatant lie on behalf of Tether.

Final Thoughts

Tether & Bitfinex cannot be trusted. If you’re currently invested in / or you’re using the Bitfinex exchange, I’d suggest that you start using quite literally anything else. Fast.

Crypto.com & Binance offer similar functionality and are far more verifiable and trustworthy.

In terms of Tether, sell it / stop using it immediately. Instead, opt for its verified counterpart USDC. Tether can no longer be allowed to enjoy such enormous funding and market participation when it could quite literally disappear at any moment.

Tether and Bitfinex are a ticking time-bomb positioned deep inside the crypto market. If they go off, the damage they will wreak is unfathomable and it would be a tragedy to have your hard-earned money destroyed in the process. As this article has shown, the tiny amount of people that make up the Tether team are deeply untrustworthy, malicious characters. Each of these individuals owns around $5 billion from their involvement in Tether alone and that is far too much capital to be resting in the hands of liars and swindlers.

I hope you found this information useful.

Coinsmart. Beste Bitcoin-Börse in Europa
Source: https://medium.com/project-shekel/tether-is-a-lie-the-unstable-coin-6a0681414676?source=rss——-8—————–cryptocurrency