Actor Stephen Harrison has issued an apology to the investors who lost an estimated $1.3 billion in the HyperVerse cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme.1Harrison was hired as a “corporate presenter,” which his agent explained to him was simply acting out a role to represent a business. He became suspicious after reading the scripts for the videos, but after doing some online searches he felt “everything seemed OK, so I rolled with it.”During recording, he was asked to use the name Steven Reece Lewis. In the videos, Harrison talked about investment opportunities with HyperVerse. The final version of the videos referred to him as CEO, and also included his “credentials”: degrees from Leeds and Cambridge universities and more than 10 years of experience in the fintech industry. The problem was, neither university nor any fintech firms had ever heard of Steven Reece Lewis, which piqued the interest of the SEC.

Source: The Guardian February 24, 2024 00:41 UTC