According to the United Daily News report, Huang Weixuan, the founder of the digital asset management platform Steaker, is suspected of launching investment plans with annual interest rates ranging from 3.5% to 88% to attract public investment in virtual currencies, illegally operating deposit-taking businesses, and siphoning off approximately NT$1.48 billion. The Taipei District Prosecutor’s Office has concluded the investigation today, prosecuting Huang Weixuan, the company’s Chief Technology Officer Xiu Minjie, Chief Marketing Officer Lu Tianxin, and Chief Operating Officer Pan Yiting for the crime of illegally operating deposit-taking businesses under the Banking Act.
According to the report, the indictment states that Huang Weixuan and others claimed that the Steaker platform established a SAFU user asset security fund through the company Cybavo to protect customers from losses due to abnormal trading platform operations or hacker attacks, enticing users to transfer Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), as well as stablecoins like USDT, USDC, BUSD, and DAI into the Steaker platform for investment, thus illegally operating deposit-taking businesses, amounting to approximately NT$1,485,435,076.
The prosecution found that the virtual currency in the personal wallets of the Steaker platform would automatically transfer a certain amount to the multi-signature wallet of Huang Weixuan, Chief Technology Officer Xiu Minjie, and Chief Operating Officer Pan Yiting. Huang instructed Xiu to periodically transfer the funds from the deposit wallet to Huang’s FTX exchange Entryonly sub-account wallet, which would then be transferred to the FTX or Binance exchanges for strategic trading, or transferred to the Steaker withdrawal wallet, or used for high-interest lending to others for arbitrage.
In addition, the prosecution also uncovered that Huang instructed Xiu to transfer virtual currency from the FTX exchange account to personal currency dealers at the end or beginning of each month, to pay salaries for employees of the company Shidi Ke (the parent company of Steaker), as well as office rent and other operating funds, accusing Huang of mixing virtual assets to create currency flow points.
In November 2022, Steaker announced that due to the impact of the FTX bankruptcy incident, it would suspend redemption services for some investment plans. In the following month, Huang Weixuan was searched and questioned by the authorities for allegedly providing principal-protected investment plans online and illegally siphoning off hundreds of millions of NT dollars.
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