The Viseming Ponzi scheme has collapsed, its website now displaying a "404 not found" error as of late September. This shutdown followed the scheme's operators initiating an exit scam with the launch of the VSM token. The announcement came via a cell phone video featuring a hired actor portraying "Sebastian Ferguson," Viseming's supposed CFO.
Ferguson's scripted message, delivered from a driveway, repeatedly emphasized investor trust. The video announced the VSM token’s launch for May 2022. This announcement failed to attract sufficient new investors, prompting Viseming to disable withdrawals for its existing participants. The company’s main website went offline shortly after.
Viseming posted a statement on Facebook about 12 hours prior to the website's disappearance, attempting to explain the situation. The post claimed payments were previously manual and first-come, first-served. It stated the company was moving to a new level with a significant increase in new partners, making it difficult for specialists to keep up. The post asserted that 65% of pending applications had been paid. It also mentioned that any returned applications would be processed within 72 hours by an IT department working on a new automatic payment system designed to monitor transactions and prevent third-party interference. The company apologized for temporary inconvenience and thanked users for their understanding.
Such explanations are common among fraudulent schemes. A company requiring extensive backend changes would not typically pull its entire website offline for three days to implement them. Viseming also disabled comments on its official Facebook page and YouTube channel, a move often made to prevent user feedback and complaints.
As part of its exit scam, Viseming fabricated a $15 million investment from an individual in Dubai. The company uploaded a video titled "VISEMING LTD – $ 15,000,000. Institutional investor, representative of Arab countries, now with us!" to its YouTube channel two days before the collapse. This video used drone footage of a city that is not in the UAE, a building with a doctored Viseming logo, rented vehicles with fake license plates, and Eastern European actors pretending to be Arabs. The drone footage of the city appears unrelated to the footage of the rented vehicles. At the 0:46 mark in the video, the text "Huis van de Europese Geschiedenis" is visible. This translates to the House of European History, a museum located in Brussels, Belgium. It is highly probable that Viseming used random stock footage for this purported announcement. The cars in the video drive through unspecified locations.