Freeway Crypto Stops Withdrawals After Promising 43% Returns

Freeway, a UK-based crypto platform that promised annual returns of up to 43%, stopped withdrawals on Sunday, according to a notice published on the company’s website. Freeway’s native cryptocurrency, which goes by the ticker FWT, fell 74% after the announcement, and to top it all off, the Freeway website appears to be scrubbing the names and photos of some executives.

Upset users have taken to the community Telegram channel for Motorway, expressing frustration at not being able to access their accounts. People who asked friends and family members to invest in the platform seemed the most angry, based on comments seen by Gizmodo early Monday.

The news was first reported by the crypto watchdog’s Twitter account FatManTerracomes in the wake of other high-profile collapses in the crypto space this year, including Celsius, which has filed for bankruptcy. FatManTerra tweeted on Saturday that they believed Freeway was a Ponzi scheme that would probably collapse at this point next year.

Well, apparently we didn’t have to wait a whole year for things to collapse. It appears to have happened in just one day, as Freeway’s website includes a diverse array of confusing terms to explain that users no longer have access to their money. And that sounds a lot like what Celsius said after it announced it was stopping withdrawals June.

“As you will all be aware, there has been unprecedented volatility in the currency and cryptocurrency markets of late,” the note on Freeway’s website said says.

“Freeway has therefore decided to diversify its asset base to manage exposure to future market swings and volatility to ensure the long-term sustainability and profitability of the Freeway Ecosystem. This will allow Freeway to maintain the highest level of Supercharger simulation rewards,” the note continues.

What the hell are Supercharger simulation rewards? A YouTube video titled “Freeway Superchargers Explained,” demonstrates how users can earn incredible returns by giving Freeway money – from 10% to purchase the original token to as high as 43% in return on investment. But it’s not clear how giving Freeway this currency actually made such an incredible profit for its users. Oddly enough, users can also “bet” gold and earn money. It is also not clear how it would work.

Freeway has handled roughly $160 million in value, according to its website, although that claim could not be independently verified. There is nothing on the website that explains how any kind of service was offered by Freeway beyond turning crypto into more crypto. And while it might sound great to just get paid a ton of money to do nothing, that’s not usually how any real value is created in the world.

“We built it to create benefits and rewards for people, and I want to see those people benefit and be rewarded for it,” Graham Doggart, one of Freeway’s founders, said in a typical explanation from a video posted on the company’s YouTube channel .

Despite posting dozens of videos on YouTube, every explanation of Freeway seems to talk about the platform as some kind of big money-making machine without actually explaining the mechanism that makes it work. And amazingly, it doesn’t seem to matter if the crypto market is generally doing well or not, you’re always going to make money, according to the Freeway promotional videos.

“It doesn’t matter if the market goes up or down, you always get a little bit more of what we already have,” Matt Spangard, CTO of Freeway, said in a video from 12 July 2021.

“The market takes a dip, when it goes back up, you have more than you started with, so you’re much better off than if it was in a traditional account somewhere or even offline,” Spangard continued.

Freeway executives call it “social finance,” which is described in similarly opaque terms.

“Social finance is a concept where money, or finance, is done in a way that benefits all the people connected to it,” Sadie Hutton, founder and co-CEO, said in a YouTube video without elaborating on what hell that means.

One of Freeway’s claims to fame was winning an award for “Staking Platform of the Year 2022” at a conference called AIBC Asia in Dubai, where it was up against companies that included Celsius, according to a video published to Vimeo with a man named Martyn Richard, called Chief Brand Officer.

Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine shows that eight people used to be listed on the company’s website as of last month. The website lists Sadie Hutton as founder and co-CEO, Graham Doggart as founder and co-CEO, and Peter Neilson as founder and director, along with many others. But the Freeway website does not currently list anyone as connected to the project.

A YouTube video published in July 2021 shows many additional faces associated with the project not included in the summary of principals listed on the website last month.

Hutton, Doggart and Spangard did not immediately respond to emailed questions early Monday, and the announcement on Freeway’s website did not clear up the confusion. The company positions the stop in withdrawals as a temporary thing, and promises to update the community later.

While this process is ongoing, Freeway will be allocating capital to its underlying portfolio, and this means that for an interim period we will not be purchasing Supercharger simulations until our new strategies are implemented.

We will notify you when we are ready to resume partial Supercharger simulation purchases (buybacks) and then again as we can resume full Supercharger simulation purchases as well as on-platform Freeway Token (FWT) deposits and purchases.

While we complete this process, we cannot comment further beyond this statement.

We look forward to updating you further soon.

The Freeway website explained that the company was working on something called the Freeway Spend Account, including a “virtual debit card” in the future.

From the Freeway YouTube channel, it appears that the Freeway project actually started as something called AuBit, which posted its first video on 16 October 2020. Sadie Hutton appears in the video talking about “Freeway tokens”, claiming that they had been building their project for three years “on the sly” before announcing it to the world.

“We’ve done a private sale of our AuBit One security tokens – it’s not something that’s available for retail, so we don’t market or publicize it – but we’ve actually sold… we’ve sold almost two million dollars of AuBit One now,” Hutton claims in the video.

That video only has 223 views on YouTube as of this writing, and you can see an evolution in 2021 moving away from the AuBit brand to talk more prominently about Freeway. The AuBit.io website is currently redirecting to the Freeway website, although old videos are on Vimeo seems to show leaders for something called AuBit Primeincluding Sotirios Botsios, who is listed as Director of Technology and Operations, and Sotiris Probonas, listed as CEO.

While Gizmodo was repeatedly booted from Telegram chat for Freeway on Monday, other users asked why crypto flus Coach K had deleted old tweets promote highway.

“I think the answer to that is obvious,” replied one user.