HyperFund: 1% a day, $1.89bn, and no mining operation

Why this case matters

The promised return was between 0.5% and 1% a day.

At 1% daily, compounded, $1,000 becomes more than $37 billion in three years. It is not a high return; it is an impossible one, and it was the headline term of a scheme that took in $1.89 billion.

This is the single most useful thing on this page. The arithmetic that disproves an HYIP is available before any investigation, before any due diligence, before you know anything at all about who is running it. It requires no expertise, and it takes about fifteen seconds.

What was alleged

The SEC charged the scheme on 29 January 2024, describing HyperFund as a crypto asset pyramid scheme that raised more than $1.7 billion from investors worldwide. The Justice Department’s parallel case puts the figure at approximately $1.89 billion, running from June 2020 to November 2022.

Investors bought “membership” packages. The daily rewards were said to come from HyperFund’s large-scale crypto mining operations, and from an association with a Fortune 500 company.

The SEC’s allegation is that there were no such operations, and that HyperFund had no source of revenue other than money from investors.

Where the cases stand

Brenda Chunga, a top promoter known online as “Bitcoin Beautee”, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud and wire fraud. The plea was unsealed on 29 January 2024, and sentencing has been continued to 7 January 2027.

Rodney Burton, a promoter, was sentenced on 23 July 2026 to 32 months’ imprisonment with credit for time served since 3 January 2024, followed by three years of supervised release.

Xue “Sam” Lee, of Dubai, is alleged to be a co-founder and is charged with one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and wire fraud. That case is pending. An indictment is an allegation and he is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

The promoter layer

The convictions and pleas so far are of promoters, not founders — and that is the structural fact about this kind of scheme.

An HYIP does not need a sales force it pays. It needs members who recruit, because the referral structure makes recruitment the fastest way for an investor to improve their own position. By the time it collapses, a large fraction of the people who brought others in are themselves out of pocket, and some of them are also defendants.

That is what makes these schemes hard to warn people about. The person telling you about it is not a salesman. It is somebody you know, who believes it, and who has already been paid.

The tell that was always there

Everything else about HyperFund — the mining claim, the Fortune 500 association, the app, the dashboards — is a reason to look further, and looking further takes weeks.

The 1% a day did not. Any return quoted per day, and any return described as guaranteed, is arithmetically incompatible with a real business, and both were on the label.