Incessant purveyor of get-rich-quick disasters Simon Stepsys has been given a suspended jail sentence for cheating the taxman.
He was the director of the unwisely named Simon Stepsys Success International Limited, which was put into compulsory liquidation by HM Revenue and Customs owing £171,000.
Stepsys was prosecuted for failing to keep accounting records and on the day he pleaded guilty he posted on Facebook: “Relax, stay positive”.
Claire Ravenscroft of the Insolvency Service told Crewe Magistrates Court: “He appears to have prioritised paying money to himself rather than HMRC.”
The 55-year-old from Nantwich, Cheshire, got a suspended 16-week jail sentence and must carry out 200 hours of community work.
Stepsys, a ludicrous narcissist who posts endless pictures of himself on Facebook, is already banned from being a company director until 2027.
For years I’ve been charting his bonkers money-making schemes that promise huge returns before imploding, leaving investors in the lurch.
The most recent is Meme Club, which claims to be a Bitcoin trading platform. Stepsys promoted this lot on his Facebook page, boasting that he’d reached the rank of Diamond President, whatever that means.
He posted: “Earnings 30%+ monthly. This works like clockwork.”
Except it doesn’t. Meme Club posted on its Facebook page last month a message warning that there were problems with letting members withdraw their money, and it hasn’t posted since.
Meme Club’s website, which hides its registration details behind privacy settings, promises “100% profit”, while contradicting this with the warning: “Results can fluctuate as they depend on our Futures Trading results and Robotised Trading Software.”
The website also says you can make money from its “referral commission system”, which means you get paid for persuading others to join, and then get a cut of any money pumped in by people that they in turn recruit.
This operation has been looked into by BehindMLM.com, which tracks multi-level marketing "opportunities".
It reported that the person appearing in Meme Club promotional videos as its supposed chief executive Patrick Meier is, in fact, a hired Russian actor, made-up to look older. You can read its findings here.
I emailed Meme Club but it did not offer any proof that Patrick Meier is a real person, give me its office address, explain its crypto trading platform, or respond to the claim by BehindMLM that it is a Ponzi scheme.
And it was silent when I asked if it wanted to comment on its inclusion on the list of companies with “signs of illegal activity in the financial market” published by the Central Bank of Russia.
I branded Stepsys a menace as long ago as 2006, when I exposed Host4Income and the pyramid scheme MyVideoTalk, which he claimed was “an outstanding opportunity!” before it collapsed.
Then there was My Advertising Pays, supposedly a way to make money by clicking on online ads, which was slated by the Advertising Standards Authority for “misleading and unproven” earnings claims.
This was followed by the doomed and very similar The Advertising Platform, with Stepsys gushing: “Who wants to make enough to buy a Ferrari for cash?”
Some cryptocurrency guff called Mind.Capital came next, and we shouldn't forget the short-lived Crypto World Evolution, with Stepsys calling its payment plan the best he’d ever seen.
Now, with depressing inevitability, he’s promoting yet another scheme.
He hasn’t said what it’s called but in a Facebook post he says he’s recruiting “motivated people who want to earn at least 6 figures (maybe even 7!) in 2023!”
What could possibly go wrong?
investigate@mirror.co.uk
