Troy Hogg

As frauds go, it’s difficult to imagine anything cruder than the crypto scam committed by Troy Hogg’s Arbitrade Group, which raised $41 million by selling digital tokens that it claimed were backed by billions of dollars of gold bullion that, in reality, did not exist. There were already plenty of red flags on message boards and the local media in Bermuda by the time OffshoreAlert revealed in January 2019 that Hogg was a concert promoter and multi-level marketer against whom eight judgments for more than C$372,000 had been entered in Ontario in 2008-2009 alone and that Arbitrade’s other insiders included an undischarged bankrupt whose Trustee accused of perpetrating a $3.5 million Ponzi scheme against "friends" and "family" and a penny stock broker whose previous employers included six broker-dealers that U.S. regulators had expelled from the securities industry after committing fraud. One of the few people to not see anything wrong was Bermuda’s Premier, David Burt, who approved Arbitrade’s purchase of a prominent office building in Bermuda and claimed that the company and its principals had passed “enhanced due diligence” and “all financial and background checks. Nearly two years after OffshoreAlert’s exposé, Hogg’s assets were frozen by the Ontario Securities Commission as part of a fraud investigation.