What it was
Mirror Trading International Proprietary Limited was a company organised under the laws of the Republic of South Africa. It ran what it presented as a foreign exchange trading pool and it accepted only bitcoin as the way to buy into that pool. Members recruited other members and earned on what those members put in, which is the multi-level marketing part. The trading was supposed to be done by a proprietary bot, marketed as "Advanced Intelligence Software with Bitcoin as the base currency".
That structure is why the entry sits in a Bitcoin directory. The deposits were bitcoin, solicited from the public through the websites mirrortradinginternational.au.za, mtimembers.com and mymticlub.com and through social media.
On the record
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed a civil enforcement action in the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas on 30 June 2022 against Mirror Trading International and its founder and chief executive Cornelius Johannes Steynberg.
On 24 April 2023 Judge Lee Yeakel entered an order of default judgment and permanent injunction against Steynberg. The order finds him liable for fraud in connection with retail foreign currency transactions, fraud by an associated person of a commodity pool operator, registration violations, and failure to comply with commodity pool operator regulations. It requires him to pay $1,733,838,372 in restitution and a civil monetary penalty of the same amount, which the CFTC records as the highest civil monetary penalty it has ever obtained.
On 6 September 2023 Judge David A. Ezra entered a consent order against the company itself, finding Mirror Trading International liable for fraud in connection with retail forex transactions, fraud by a commodity pool operator, registration violations and failure to comply with commodity pool operator regulations, and requiring more than $1.7 billion in restitution.
The findings record that between approximately May 2018 and March 2021 the scheme took at least 29,421 bitcoin, valued at over $1,733,838,372 at the end of that period, from at least 23,000 people in the United States and more elsewhere, and that all of it was misappropriated. The company is in liquidation in South Africa. The CFTC's own notices state that Steynberg was a fugitive from South African law enforcement and has been detained in Brazil on an INTERPOL arrest warrant since December 2021. Listing here is not endorsement.