VAST AI investment scheme collapses, leaving victims in the dark
VAST AI advertised exclusive investment packages for their “VIP employees”, promising unrealistic returns by renting out computer chips. Photo: Telegram VAST AI was sold to South Africans as a way to earn money by “leasing” computer chips used for artificial intelligence. They ran a “Super AI” special from 24 to 27 October, advertising returns of […]
VAST AI advertised exclusive investment packages for their “VIP employees”, promising unrealistic returns by renting out computer chips. Photo: Telegram
- VAST AI was sold to South Africans as a way to earn money by “leasing” computer chips used for artificial intelligence.
- They ran a “Super AI” special from 24 to 27 October, advertising returns of up to 7x your money in two days.
- Members are called “employees”. Their salaries depend on depositing money and recruiting other people to deposit money.
- Deposits were paid into money mule accounts through a separate payment page.
- VAST has a registered Colorado company, originally a crypto exchange. That crypto exchange is being investigated.
- VAST has now collapsed. On Friday all three of its website domains were placed on hold by their registrar, and the websites no longer load.
- Approved withdrawals were never paid, and its Telegram channel has started advertising a new scam.
If you’ve been on TikTok or were in a Facebook group this year, you may have been invited to become an “employee” of VAST AI.
People were told they could rent out powerful computer chips used by AI and collect the profits. Members who brought in friends were promised a monthly salary.
A Facebook influencer promoting VAST AI claimed to have made more than R500 from their initial R100 investment. Photo: Facebook Screenshot
VAST never actually rented out anything. It showed a list of “verified withdrawals” on their homepage. I analysed the code and found this to be fake.
On Saturday 24 October, VAST ran its biggest special yet. By Tuesday, members were posting on Facebook that withdrawals marked “approved” had not reached their bank accounts.
On Friday afternoon, VAST went dark. At 2:16pm, the registrar for vast-zaf.com, vast-zaf.online and vast-zaf.store placed all three domains on hold. The websites stopped loading. Every member has lost their balance and pending withdrawals. VAST’s Telegram channel, which has about 16,400 subscribers, has not mentioned VAST since and has instead started promoting a new scheme.
Shortly before its collapse, VAST claimed that South Africa’s National Treasury ordered it to collect tax on behalf of investors. Photos: Telegram
The scheme has collapsed. Just days before, the operators of VAST said that they were undergoing a “financial audit” and were informed by the “National Treasury of South Africa” that they had to withhold funds for “Personal Income Tax (PIT)”. The real pit, of course, is the financial hole in which victims now find themselves, some claiming to have sunk their life savings into the scheme.
Have you lost money to VAST AI or a similar scheme? GroundUp may be interested in investigating. Email your story to [email protected]. Please note that we don’t have capacity to respond to all emails.The pitch
Morita Forestry, another scam we reported, sold South Africans American woodlands. VAST sold computing power.
Members added funds to their wallet, and used it to “lease” graphics processing units, or GPUs. These are the chips that companies use to train and run AI. VAST said you would earn revenue while the chip was rented out, and get your investment back at the end.
Products ranged from R100 for two days to R40,000 for 400 days.
Product
You pay
Promised revenue
Period
GTX 1650 core
R100
R40
2 days
GTX 1050 Ti core
R250
R125
5 days
RX 6500 XT
R500
R250
10 days
RTX 3050 core
R5,000
R9,000
50 days
RTX 5090 D core
R30,000
R648,000
360 days
H100 80GB SXM5 core
R40,000
R1,280,000
400 days
There is no coherent logic behind these numbers. A real H100 chip costs far more than R40,000 to buy, and nobody rents one out at a profit of R1.28-million. VAST had pictures of hardware, technical product names and a steady stream of AI news on its Telegram channel.
Then there are the specials. The “Super AI” event ran from 7pm on Saturday, 24 October, to 7pm on Tuesday, 27 October. “The company will not retain any profits,” VAST told members. It warned that the next chance “might not come for another two or three years”.
You pay
Promised after 2 days
R500
R1,100
R2,000
R5,600
R5,000
R17,000
R10,000
R40,000
R20,000
R100,000
R50,000
R350,000
In the days around the special, the channel told members to top up their accounts in advance so they would not miss out.
Morita did the same thing. Shortly before it stopped paying, it ran a “carbon credit trading event” that promised up to R110,000 from an R8,700 investment. Nobody got that payout. This is a common pattern for schemes that are about to leave or “fly away” as the promoters say on TikTok. They refer to these schemes as “amabhanoyi”, literally meaning planes.
Shared by the fraudsters with the caption: “Congratulations to VIP3 member Alvin on the successful conclusion of your second offline meet up! A total of 19 people attended. 🥳👏” Photos: Telegram
Shared by the fraudsters with the caption: “Today 👉 his team has grown to 82 members, he has advanced to VIP4 🏅, and his cumulative earnings have reached 31,950 Rand 💰.” Images: Telegram
Another in-person event held by VAST AI members. Images: Telegram
Employees who recruit
VAST called its members “employees” and promised them monthly salaries. The salaries depended on how much money members deposited and how many people they recruited (who then made deposits themselves).
To reach VIP2, you needed to have deposited R2,500, recruited six people who had deposited a combined R6,000, and brought in five new members that week. The promised salary was R4,500 a month.
At VIP8, you needed R50,000 of your own money invested, 1,000 paying people recruited, R2.5-million in deposits across your team, and 150 new members every week. The promised salary was R120,000 a month. At VIP10, the top level, the promised salary was R300,000 a month, for 5,000 members and 300 new recruits per week.
On top of that, members earned commissions on the rentals of people they recruited. The platform also had a “treasure box”, where you would unlock a box of prizes depending on how many members you had recruited.
Promoters on TikTok have posted VAST recruitment videos with their phone numbers on screen. One TikTok caption promoted VAST and another “AI” platform in the same video. A Facebook group using a different brand name, NSCALE, advertised the same R100 and R250 offers. VAST also had a recruitment “meet up” with 30 attendees in mid-October.
Where did the money go?
I registered an account and started a R1,000 deposit (but did not actually pay).
VAST didn’t give me a company bank account as you’d expect with a real investment; instead, it sent me to a separate payment page on a different website, checkpayinfo.diguosd.com. That page gave me two Nedbank personal accounts, a payment reference, and five minutes to pay. These were mule accounts, and that site – diguosd.com – is popular amongst schemes and appears to be Chinese operated. it is an illicit payment gateway.
The instructions are strict. Use an immediate payment or PayShap. Get new bank details for every deposit. Do not save as a beneficiary. Why? Because these are mule accounts that get shut down often, and if you save the account and pay when it’s shut down, the scammers don’t get the money.
This is the payment page, which shows the victim a money mule account to pay into, and a unique reference to use. This is generated when the user requests to deposit. Image: Screenshot
The payment page itself is simple. It reads the bank details, the amount and the reference from the link that VAST generates, and displays them. Its developer comments are in Chinese. There is no check in the code that the account belongs to VAST, or to anyone in particular.
The diguosd.com domain is older than VAST; it was registered in November 2023. It runs a series of “pay” and “checkout” pages. Network records trace back to ANY DIGITAL PTE. LTD., a Singapore-registered network operator based in Hong Kong. The site also has Chinese developer comments throughout its pages.
On Friday afternoon, after VAST’s domains went offline, the diguosd payment page was still online.
A company in Colorado
Like Morita, VAST points to a registered company in Colorado, USA, called VAST AI LTD.
The company was incorporated on 18 September 2023, not as VAST but as Tdsr EXchange LTD. (A crypto exchange under the TDSR brand has previously been the subject of scam warnings.) The original registered agent, incorporator and filer was named as Todd Mitchell Anderson.
The company went delinquent in February 2025 for failing to file a report. Then on 23 May 2026, eight days after VAST’s domains were registered, two filings were made seven minutes apart. The first restored the company and changed its registered agent to Jonathan Scott Benton. The second corrected its name to VAST AI LTD.
These are the same tactics that Morita used. Morita’s Colorado company was originally Global Ocean Group Limited. It too was delinquent, was restored, changed agents, and had its name changed shortly before the scheme took off.
The original filer’s name, Todd Mitchell Anderson, appears in filings for six other Colorado entities. Three stand out:
- JHMFX GLOBAL LIMITED is a defendant in a complaint filed by Colorado’s attorney general in May. It alleges hundreds of companies used a Denver virtual mailbox without permission, and that the only authorised customer was a Chinese individual living in Wuwei, China. Separately, New Zealand’s Financial Markets Authority lists a JHMFX trading platform in its warning about a network of fake investment websites.
- Willow LTD, formerly called keyfan cn, was restored and renamed in May 2026. Both filings name Todd Mitchell Anderson as the filer. Keyfan cn is a defendant in a companion complaint about another mailbox at the same Denver address, rented to a Chinese individual living in Shenzhen, China.
- Orca Node Limited, previously Iclaw Node, has a rather blunt line on its official Colorado record: “This entity is unauthorized or fraudulent.” Its registered agent company, Yufeng Services LLC, has the same warning.
The attorney general’s cases are part of a crackdown announced in May on thousands of businesses allegedly registered with false information. According to Westword, more than 12,000 businesses were using the same downtown Denver address.
As of 30 October, Colorado’s data still lists VAST AI LTD in “Good Standing”.
Borrowed names, recycled code
VAST borrowed credibility from real companies.
Its company page described Vast.ai, a legitimate American marketplace where people rent out GPUs. Its Telegram channel posted news about VAST Data, a separate and also legitimate data company recently valued at US$30-billion. A post on 20 October closely tracked a VAST Data press release from the day before.
A post on VAST’s Telegram channel displayed member earnings and congratulated members of “NEBIUS”, an unrelated AI company, while linking to VAST’s website. Image: Screenshot
On 21 May, a Telegram post congratulating members on their earnings referred to NEBIUS, another real AI cloud company, while linking directly to vast-zaf.com. It almost seems as if they forgot which scam they had to post about! Later posts in the same style say VAST.
VAST’s terms and conditions referred to Indian law, South African payment references, and arbitration in Indonesia. At one point they mentioned “Indian Rupees (ZAR)”. The platform’s configuration includes options for Nigerian, Brazilian and Mexican payments, and internally identifies this deployment as site number 12. The Android app’s package name is com.vastai.za12. The descriptions and the code comments are all written in Chinese.
This looks like a reusable platform developed in Chinese and set up for many countries, potentially operated by a syndicate like Morita. South Africa is one of many favourite markets amongst scammers. It is much like what I found when I traced the payment platform behind Morita.
Another Morita?
Morita Forestry
VAST AI
The pitch
American woodlands
AI computer chips
Members called
Partners and employees
Employees
Rewards for recruiting
Salaries, phones, cars
Salaries, commissions, “treasure boxes”
Final special
Carbon credit trading event
Super AI
Deposits
Mule accounts via a payment page, or crypto
Mule accounts via a payment page
Colorado company
Global Ocean Group Limited, restored and renamed
Tdsr EXchange LTD, restored and renamed
Excuse when withdrawals stopped
A “financial audit” and bank settlement delays
A bank “compliance review” and an audit
Developed in
Chinese
Chinese
GroundUp found that some administrators of VAST’s WhatsApp groups were also administrators of groups associated with the earlier Morita Forestry investment scheme. Image: Screenshot
Also interesting to note is that some of the administrators of the VAST WhatsApp groups are some of the same administrators of the Morita WhatsApp groups.
The audit excuse, and the end
Victims began questioning VAST on Facebook after withdrawals that were marked as approved were never actually paid. Image: Screenshot
As the Super AI special ended, Facebook posts started asking the same question. Why had withdrawals marked “approved” or “completed” not arrived?
Messages from a VAST manager blamed delayed withdrawals on a compliance review by the nonexistent “National Bank of South Africa”, promising members compensation of ten times their investment. Images: Facebook
One public post shared screenshots of WhatsApp messages from a group called “AI Working Group”, with messages by manager “Quentin Peason”. The messages blamed a compliance review by the “National Bank of South Africa” and delays in cross-border settlement for people not getting their payouts. They promised that the company would compensate members ten times, and that the audit would be completed by 29 October.
There is no “National Bank of South Africa”.
In a Facebook group, another member asked whether anyone who had paid an extra “tax” had received their withdrawal. Typically, when an investment scam is about to collapse, they try to squeeze as much money out at the end by saying things like, “You must pay a tax before withdrawing”.
Morita’s collapse followed this same script: a big special, then withdrawals stop, then “a 24-hour special financial audit”.
Meanwhile, VAST’s Telegram channel carried on as if nothing was wrong. While members were being told about an audit, it posted irrelevant updates about a “Cache Scheduling Engine Upgrade” and a “Compute Performance Dashboard”. Its last post related to VAST was on Thursday morning, 29 October, the day the audit was supposed to end.
The next day, VAST disappeared. At 2:16pm on Friday, Hostinger, the company through which all three VAST domains were registered, placed them on “client hold”. This status takes a domain off the internet.
What to do
If you had money in VAST, it is unlikely the scheme will ever pay it back. Do not pay anything to “unlock” or “verify” a withdrawal. And do not pay any “Personal Income Tax” either.
Keep records of everything. This includes any proof of payment, the account name and number you paid into, the payment reference, screenshots of your VAST balance, and any WhatsApp or Telegram messages.
Report the receiving bank account(s) to your bank’s fraud department as soon as possible, and open a case with the police. You can contact the Financial Sector Conduct Authority toll free on 0800 110 443 to check whether a provider is authorised, and report suspicious activity to its Ethics and Fraud Hotline on 0800 313 626.
Be wary of anyone who contacts you offering to recover your money (usually for a fee). These recovery scams often target people who have just lost money. In Morita Forestry’s case, many victims lost even more after paying a “private investigator” to recover their funds (the “investigator” simply showed them GroundUp articles as information that they had found).
Watch out for the signs: an opportunity you can only join by invitation; a fixed daily return; paying into a personal bank account (mule) rather than a company one; pressure to recruit; official paperwork displayed to create credibility; sudden audits; and other suspicious signs.
Since the crash of VAST AI, similar schemes have popped up. Some seem to be part of the same syndicate, but I have not yet investigated these. Please be cautious if you see one of these schemes: investing in “Vast Core AI” (copycat); investing in warehouses; Prestige Wealth Investments (using the name of a legitimate financial services provider); investing in “BoxPower”; and more. If anything promises a daily or unrealistic return, it’s likely to be a scam.